


The Issue with Oxytocin

by ffantastic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Awkward First Times, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Massage, Pesterlog, Wet Dream, a really old one which shows how long this idea has been haunting my formerly innocent dreams, and see i added something to the summary, and so people finally know what this is about it's a, and spoiler alert also, as in professional, dave is kind of an unreliable narrator but that should come as no surprise, everyone meaning the beta kids because no one else will play a major role, everyone's living in the same unspecified city somewhere in the usa, i guess, inspired by a tumblr post, kind of thing, last chapter is a summary of the rest of the outline, later on, not explicit though, not massaging each other, probably, this tag was made for this fic, well more than one, yet - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 07:43:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 45,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2643770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ffantastic/pseuds/ffantastic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In all fifteen years Dave has spent on this planet, it seemed nothing important ever changed, and he sat and watched and did what he always did.</p><p>Then he makes an unexpected discovery and staying in his designated place is the least thing he wants.</p><p>- - -</p><p>Dave felt giddy from laughter that wasn't his own, and it was with a reluctant redundancy that he asked the question after the door to his room had closed behind him.</p><p>“So, what do you want to do now?”</p><p>John, already sitting on the edge of Dave's bed, scrunched up his eyebrows and tapped his finger to his lips as if he had to think up an eloquent response.</p><p>“You.”<br/>___</p><p>Because I'm no longer into Homestuck, and the premise of this story makes me uneasy now, I abandoned writing this story. The last chapter includes an outline of the events that would have happened had I continued.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Excuses on a Saturday Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is inspired by a post I saw way back, it's linked in the end notes, so it won't ruin the surprise and you still don't know what the hell I'm talking about in that summary.

For how much it had been advertised, the place really didn’t look like much.

Maybe that was because it was situated in a quarter of the city that had recently swung from run-down and dangerous to artsy and hip, and so most buildings had a kind of industrial charme, but freshly painted fronts, at least.

The house Dave was standing in front of looked more like a future teller’s tent, the ones that reek of incense and fake gold teeth and fraud from ten meters away. Well, if a tent like that decided to settle down and turn into a house. He had given up on trying to pronounce the name on the new dark red sign, the fine gold script let the faintly French name appear much more pretentious. He didn’t want to pronounce it. He didn’t want to be here at all.

It felt as if unseen eyes were watching him from the folds of the velvet curtains that filled what were supposed to be shop windows. Dave could imagine them, girls with long dark hair, brown eyes twinkling as they laughed at him; why was he just standing there, why wasn’t he going in or walking on, there was nothing else here, he probably looked like a drug addict – no, he didn’t look strung-out, his skin and his hair were too smooth and obviously cared for. He could look as if he was up to something, though, and his phone told him that he was not too early, he was on time. His friends were late.

Sighing, Dave looked at the place again and knew that this was exactly the kind of ambience Rose would feel at home in. He could practically see her emerge from that door, a faint jingling in the air and a satisfied smile on her lips, maybe Jade trailing behind, coughing from whatever fumes the air inside held, and John, looking kind of out of place but unconditionally happy, John spotting him and waving at him – oh.

That wasn’t Dave’s imagination.

They were there, they’d been inside and had apparently left their bags there. Dave crossed the street without bothering to look for cars (there were never any cars here) and stopped in front of his friends.

“I’m on time”, he pointed out for no reason in particular, other than maybe to quell the rising unease at the fact that the others had already met without him, been inside, discussed everything they’d done in the day they’d been apart, the possible outbreak of World War III, the newest proof for the existence of aliens, and found a reason for why they were even there. Probably.

“I have no fucking clue why you all thought this was an appointment where you’d need to show up half an hour early, unless I missed the memo and we’re in fact here to apply for a job and not to get all the stress of our miserable fifteen years of life kneaded out of our backs- and what the fuck, none of you is even wearing a suit, that’s like the first rule you learn to get a job.”

While Dave was still talking, they had moved inside again, where the brightness was significantly lower. The only lamp in the room was, in fact, not as bright as Rose’s hair, and Dave opened his mouth to make exactly that comment, but the thought was lost somewhere on the way to his mouth as John pulled on his hoodie string, obviously as an attempt to get him to move. It worked.

“I told you to get going, or I’d use force. Weren’t you listening?”

“I told you he wasn’t listening”, Jade chimed in from the side – way too far away. She was wandering off in some unknown direction.

“He never listens”, Rose agreed with an air of finality. She made as if to follow Jade.

There was something weird going on, why were they splitting up? Why was no one but them in this building? No one to greet them? This was a conspiracy.

“What is this, like, just to be prepared, are you going to cut me to pieces and feed me to the dogs or is this more like a bondage basement thing?”

“Man, it’s just that we’re going to be practically naked, so of course they’re going to split up the girls and the boys.”

Rose had apparently stayed just to hear the explanation and see the look on Dave’s face. Jade was also giggling, and John looked extremely pleased with himself as he jabbed a finger into Dave’s back to direct him to the door where he could now clearly see the symbol for “male”.

Okay, so apparently massages were a gender thing now, too, he hadn’t been aware, but that still didn't excuse any of that. It didn't excuse the ridiculousness that was a newly opened massage place giving out four free tickets, and it didn't make not being annoyed at Rose any easier, with how she just had to go and win the tickets and then have the gall to invite her friends.

Dave should probably have been more suspicious on Friday when Rose seemed to be in such a good mood that she took seemingly genuine interest in his caricature of their English teacher and made a few suggestions on what could still be corrected (“Oh, her glasses always sit very low on her nose, she loves sending glowering glances my way when I use a word she doesn't know the definition of. The way you portrayed her, she just looks constipated”). She had also actually laughed at the result and demanded a copy.

Unfortunately, Dave hadn't been suspicious, even though Rose usually didn't seem to show much interest in whatever he was doing during the classes they shared apart from a glance over his shoulder, a half-amused huff and maybe a sarcastic remark if it was something that allowed such a thing (which was just pretty much everything). He had felt accomplished. Someone had laughed at something he had made, and he had been there to actually see it.

She had let the bomb drop at lunch, when the four of them had come together, and the look on her face was unnervingly like the one she sported when giving out Christmas presents (probably anticipating the look of horror on the others' faces).  
No one had reacted with horror this time. Jade apparently knew what the deal was as soon as she laid eyes on the fancy envelope Rose pulled out of her bag, John read over her shoulder what the letter said, and Dave tried to appear not to eager as he reached for the second piece of paper and read that they were invited for a free full-body massage. Well, that didn't sound too bad, but he was still automatically inclined to decline. Dave's time was precious and mostly dedicated to everything within five meters of his computer, even though there was the nagging thought that his friends were right there, not more than half an hour on the bus away, and still he pretended as if they were impossible to reach as soon as his ass was planted in his computer chair and the keyboard seemed like a much better option than the daunting walk to the bus station.

Combined with how his friends were looking at him- all expecting him to try to find a way to weasel out of this, challenging (Rose), disappointed (Jade), and almost angry (John), Dave wasn't fully convinced that his usual Saturday afternoon was what he preferred. He tried anyway. He got as far as opening his mouth, at least. John was still faster.

“We know you're a loser, Dave, and no, you don't have any important meetings tomorrow, and you're also not married to your keyboard.”

“Also, it says here that this only works if we're actually four”, Jade added, “and this weekend is the only possible date.”

Rose just nodded and looked at Dave, who agreed grudgingly.

And here they were, separated into girls and boys like on a school class trip to try to ensure no one would get pregnant, being shown to fancy changing rooms by the first employee Dave had seen in this establishment.

It was kind of stupid that Dave hadn't realized they'd practically be naked, and he made a point to undress and wrap the towel around his hips as fast as he could without appearing as if he was hurrying. He was so focused on that task that he didn't notice John had already gone through the door into the room where the pretty girls with strong hands waited for them. Dave followed and lay down the way he was shown by the smiling young woman, closing his eyes and barely registering the wink John sent his way, for whatever reason.

As soon as his girl had warned him she'd start and ran her oil-slick hands along his back, he thought he knew why. She dug her hands in the muscles on his neck, stiff from bad posture and endless hours in maladjusted chairs, and Dave was sure that there had been a thought in his head he wanted to voice, but on the way to his mouth the words turned into a completely different sound.

Was it more pain or pleasure? He wasn't sure, it was as if there was a good kind of pain, pushing all the strains his body had to endure to a place where they could easily be pulled out by skilled hands like these. It felt like he was slowly ascending to enlightenment, up until Dave realized John had been desperately trying to keep in his laughter on the other side of the room.

“What”, Dave managed to croak out. There was more, but it was stuck under the hands currently pinching along his spine.

“Dude, you sound like a twelve year old girl who just discovered she has nipples.”

At this point, John was actually laughing out loud and the sudden realisation hit Dave that it was in fact him who was making those painfully high-pitched sounds, and he swore to himself to never again make a sound that could be described as a moan. John's description was just too objectively accurate, and he did not want to sound like a preteen masturbating, no matter the context.

The hands went away for a moment and Dave felt collected enough to answer “What the fuck is happening in your dreams, Egbert”, but then the hands were there again and he had to amend; the next half hour didn't count, concerning the moaning issue.

 

Dave still felt as if his soul was slowly starting to inhabit every part of his body again as he stepped out of the shower cabin (they had separate showers there, what a fucking luxury), checking twice that the towel really sat securely around his hips before walking over to where John was apparently scrutinising his own face in the mirror.

Dave hadn't even said whatever stupid thing had been on his mind, but John turned around, he'd sensed someone approaching. He had obviously not paid as much thought to his towel, because it slipped without an apparent reason apart from gravity, and joined the puddles on the floor in misery of not being in contact with that body anymore. There was nothing in contact with that body anymore besides the air surrounding it.

It was a completely natural reaction. When someone is naked in front of you, you might want to avert your eyes eventually, but not before you have assured yourself that there is nothing out of the norm between their legs, like a hissing snake or a pineapple. There was neither of those things between the bare legs he was looking at, but it also felt far away from what Dave knew he himself was equipped with and he had to give his all not to cringe at the things running through his head, things like _god what a monster dong_ and _if he is a grower i am moving to nepal and joining a buddhist brotherhood but I am just going to meditate and marvel about this dick_.

It would also not let up. The towel was atop John's hipbones and he had amended with an embarassed-but-not-quite laugh and a stupid comment in less than half a minute, but even after Dave had spun a ridiculous story about the wrath of the towels that kept them occupied until they met the girls in the lounge again, even after Rose pointed out that they had heard Dave react to the massage all the way in their rooms, even after they had said goodbye and went home, he couldn't stop thinking about the fact that his best friend had a really big dick.

Which was honestly a quite stupid thing to think about, and he didn't even really feel jealous.

Jealousy was the opposite of the thoughts that kept creeping into his head.

He was honestly happy to be able to just close the apartment door behind his back and know instantly from the total quiet that he was alone, and from a few other pointers (like the ten dollar note pinned to the number of a pizza service on the back of the door) that it would stay like this for a good portion of the night. Just as relieved as he'd been that he had been able to ditch his friends before anyone had the chance to use the puppy eyes on him, even though he could hear it in the goodbyes as he got off at his stop and let the three others continue to where they would have dinner together. Though he did have to feel the phantom of Rose's disdainful stare on the back of his head for quite some time.

So while the other three were enjoying pasta at their favourite Italian in town, Dave searched for the old carrot and the stale bread he had saved for harder times while his computer was whirring to life. He was just not in the mood to call the pizza guy.  
To be honest, Dave wasn't really in the mood for interaction with anything resembling a human being, and after a while he discovered that mindless scrolling did nothing to take his mind off the obvious.

The ship of his thoughts was close to sailing into the forbidden waters of ridiculousness. It was not as if he had never seen another guy naked, he'd been in enough changing rooms and public bathrooms, and of course there had been a few well-endowed ones there, especially in the porn he'd watched. Not that Dave searched specifically for porn with big dicks, but it just happened. There wasn't a lot else, really.

And he couldn't recall ever feeling more than the slightest bit of envy, because it wasn't as if he was a lot below average, and he was also fifteen and still growing, and he definitely didn't waste his days with penis envy.

Only that this wasn't envy, and it was also not going away. It was more that Dave had the urge to do something about this amazing discovery, because a dick like that couldn’t go to waste.

The worst thing was maybe that John was so painfully unaware. He wasn't a decidedly modest person, and he would surely have made more than a few obnoxious comments if he were aware that his dick was made for dramatic zooms in porn movies with at least a semblance of a plot, for stock sites of anatomical references for artists who dabbled in beautifully shaded gay porn.

It was also attached to his best friend, who would probably never get laid on his own account. The boy would maybe recognize a girl flirting with him if he tripped over exaggerated blinking with elongated eyelashes and landed face-first in a few too many winky faces in a text, maybe, if he happened to be wearing his glasses, on a full moon. There wasn’t even a meagre chance that he’d recognize a boy flirting with him.

Something that could have been a surge of fear rose in Dave's chest at the thought that it would be a long time until someone would be fucked with that cock, if at all. It felt as if a gift was being kept from the world.

But yet, there was also something in his head that was relieved it had been him and no one else to discover that John Egbert had a fucking porno dick. He wasn't entirely sure why. It was probably because he now had the duty of making sure it didn't just stay stashed away in dorky boxers until marriage. And who would be a better candidate to teach others about the wonders of dicks than Dave Strider?

Okay, so he wasn't entirely sure what that would entail, but it wasn't early anymore – and he didn't have to justify going to bed at half past ten on a Saturday night to anyone, seeing as he didn't have any conversations going.

Dave was unwillingly mulling the same things over still as he dropped face-first onto his pillow. He figured it must be better after a good night's sleep, if sleep should ever come.

 

(It came about three hours later, just about an hour before Bro silently opened the front door, saw that the money for dinner was still there, and sighed. Something was up with the kid lately, with how he pretty much refused to leave his room or have any sorts of social contacts. He hoped it was just puberty.)

 

Dave had expected to wake up on Sunday morning with a clear mind, ready to make a plan for the mission “let Egbert know it's his duty to the world to do something with his dick apart from pissing teacher's names in the snow”. Instead he woke up in a tangle of sheets, sticky from at least two different bodily fluids. Three, to be precise. He had drooled all over his pillow, sweated all through the sheets, and had apparently also had a wet dream.

That hadn't happened in a long time, at least in like half a year, and Dave couldn't remember it ever having been so vivid. So life-like and in that, also quite disturbing. And he remembered it in excruciating detail.

In a way, it had been the answer to the question still troubling his mind when he'd fallen asleep.

“Well maybe I didn't want a fucking answer”, he grumbled into the pillow that he'd managed to shove his face into. Dave almost expected to feel sore, that was how those things worked right- there it was again. It was more of a feeling than even an image, and damn, it wasn't an unpleasant feeling, but he could feel the sweat collecting under his chin from how hot his face was getting anyway.

It wasn't that he hadn't had sexually explicit dreams about nearly everyone he knew, regardless of their gender and what he thought of them when he was awake, but he was never more phased than a short moment of surprise or disgust (“how in all the world could that mouth being anywhere near my crotch be a good idea”) and a quick inner search to assure himself that it should definitely stay a dream.

It had never gone that far, though, and Dave could say without a doubt that he had never had a dream before that involved a dick up his ass. No, really. Not even the other way around. In fact, Dave counted himself lucky that such a thing as mind readers didn't exist in this world not because the things he dreamed about were exceptionally raunchy, it was more because they were usually the complete opposite. Yet, by definition, they were still _wet_ dreams, and no one could ever convince him that blowing his load over a particularly intimate head scratching session wasn't embarrassing as fuck. There were maybe two or three blowjobs buried under at least thirty cuddling sessions in varying degrees of sexiness.

And now there'd been that dream, it had truly been like a fanfiction that skipped straight to the point but then didn't leave any detail out, wherein he had been very lovingly fucked in the butt by his best friend. If anything, he'd thought a dream like that would have involved his math teacher, who had in one dream almost sat on his face, because Dave saw her as the kind of woman who owned a sparkly pink strap-on and picked young, blond, unsuspecting men up and pounded them hard, imagining she was hammering rules and formulas into her students' heads.

Dreams with John hadn't even involved the slightest bit of naked skin before. Okay, there had been one including raspberries blown on both their stomachs, and one or two where his nose had been dangerously close to his friend's neck, but that was seriously it, so there had been a huge leap.

The next leap was one Dave wasn't sure he wanted to even make in his mind, but it was simply the logical conclusion. Yesterday he had grasped around desperately for a way to make sure Egbert would do something sensible with his gift of a cock without getting the idea that there would be people admiring him that ~~weren't Da~~ for the wrong reasons. Today his subconscious had apparently gained a strong voice, and it was saying to him _Why the fuck are you hesitating? It felt really good, it'll be good in real life too, get over yourself. You'll be doing the world a favour, you'll be... training him? Yeah, that's what you'll be doing. And you're going to have fun while doing it. And also spend more time with him, because fuck knows why you've been holing yourself up so much lately. You really-_

His subconscious was getting on his nerves. It needed to be shut off for a while.

It did have a point though. Dave rolled out of bed, noticed that he had spent nearly twelve hours in bed, and subscribed to a Sunday spent with thinking over whether he wanted to do this.

It was six in the evening and he was going to do this. He had a plan to make this work. He knew what he wanted and he was going to get it – even if it was stupid and some part of his brain wouldn't stop screaming at him that there wasn't any reason at all to do this and he was going to ruin everything, whatever this everything was.

Dave resumed to spend another few minutes with research.

Only when he was getting so tired his eyes were starting to close on their own did he finally sign into pesterchum again after a whole day and wasted no time.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 23:35 --

TG: were you aware that the girl who sits in front of you in history fucked her boyfriend like two years ago  
TG: when she was thirteen  
TG: yes thats the one with the barf coloured dog you always want to pet  
EB: what the fuck?  
EB: i don't even want to know why you thought that was relevant at all.  
EB: also have you looked at the time?  
TG: why its almost witching hour  
EB: more like go to bed like a good boy hour. if you mention even once how tired you are tomorrow you can do your homework all alone all year.  
EB: goodnight.  


\-- ectoBiologist [EB]  ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 23:47 --

 

That hadn't gone according to plan. Then again, what kind of plan was there even? Dave didn't even know what he was thinking about anymore. For once, he decided to actually follow his friend's advice and shut off his computer.

Before he did that, he noticed that someone had sent him a message the day before when he'd been offline.

 

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 14:07 --

TT: On behalf of everyone in our little group, I'm letting you know that we are worried about your recent behavior. Do you realize that you haven't been voluntarily spending time with another living being in the past months? That is very unhealthy.  
TT: We're your friends. We want to help you.  
TT: Also the pasta was delicious and Jade managed to eat two servings and half of mine. You missed something.  


\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 14:12 --

 

He blinked at his screen. This had to be a hallucination, or maybe he was asleep already. On the other hand, Dave noticed that her words sounded suspiciously close to some things she had said before, but it had never been that clear. There was no ambiguity now, but he shoved thinking about it away as far as possible. He was just going to be a good boy and go to bed now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this](http://asexualls.tumblr.com/post/86622133614/) post! I started writing for this idea in June. It's developed from there, that's why I'm saying "inspired by", not "based on".
> 
> I hope you liked the first chapter, there's definitely more to come, about ten chapters if it goes as planned. Some more general things:
> 
> I'm not a native speaker, and while I guess I can say I'm proficient in English, I still learned most of it by reading fanfics, which might be the reason for some unexpected turns of phrase, unfitting expressions etc.
> 
> The chapter title is from the song "Find a Way" by Math the Band, and they'll all be from songs by them. Most of the songs don't really have anything to do with the chapter. I just needed titles.
> 
> (there's also another idea from tumblr in there later but that would be a spoiler so I'm not linking it)
> 
> And last but not least, thanks so much to [you know who you are]! This wouldn't have happened without you.


	2. Eyes on the Prize Feet on the Floor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've never seen this kind of progress before,  
> Eyes on the prize feet on the floor
> 
> -Tour de Friends, Math the Band

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i rewrote this about five times, i just don't want to look at it anymore.

It's always easier to say what you really want to when there is a keyboard in between you and the other person involved.

That at least was Dave's reasoning for reverting to chatting instead of delivering the message in person like he had planned to. He'd tried, but the day at school had not lived up to his expectations at all. None of the stories Dave had wanted to tell came out right, or at least they didn't have the desired effect.

The desired effect being: Jealousy of what other people, at their age and with their possibilities, had already done, to the point that the request that stood at the end of it all wouldn't be met with instant rejection.

The achieved effect had been: Groans and sighs and eyerolling for the most part, sometimes snickering or laughing, but never at the right thing, mostly at him.

And now there seemed to have been enough normal nonsensical conversation for Dave to ask the question that had really bothering him all along. Well, not the question that had been on his mind since Saturday, but at least the one that had formed in his mind during the day, as the result of one of the stories he'd told.

TG: before i forget  
TG. you said you have a video of me  
TG: doing something that qualifies this video as blackmail material  
EB: i said i have a video of what you call your “experience” and that is definitely blackmail material.  
TG: wow how do you even get a video of that  
EB: before you even try to say something weird about me stalking you: i was there.  
EB: the weird thing is that you don't remember that i filmed it. you should be glad it's not on youtube!  
TG: ok what the everloving fuck are you going on about  
EB: the little girl who kissed you on the cheek at that walmart, because you saved her chips from being crushed, obviously. it must be the most hilarious video in the history of phone cameras.  
EB: it's without a doubt what you count as your first kiss. and it's also the only one.  
TG: well i might remember that trip to walmart  
TG: but the rest is just a filthy lie  
TG: my lips are far from virginal  
EB: seriously? dude, you never leave the house. who would you even kiss? the mirror?  
TG: no thats a bullshit idea  
EB: pff, that was a dead giveaway. you are definitely guilty.  
EB: next time i'm over, i'm checking the mirror for smooch marks.  
TG: despite popular belief i do not wear lipstick so good luck finding anything noticeable  
TG: and who are you to even talk i dont want to think about the objects in your house your lips might have touched  
EB: the difference here is that i accept when i'm invited to birthday parties instead of pretending i'm too busy to even look at the person who's inviting me. and birthday parties often involve spin the bottle.  
TG: no shit man i thought spin the bottle was an urban legend  
TG: all these kids are wasting their evenings trying to find the mythical beast that randomly forces people to kiss or theyll be laughed at and called a pussy  
TG: but there you are and you claim youve seen the abhorrence that is spill the bottle  
TG: spin the beans what was it like to stare into its ugly bulging eyes  
TG: fuck  
EB: i think it's getting a bit late for you. i have no idea how you would go about spinning beans...  
TG: well i surely have an idea for that and its fucking fantastic  
TG: see  
EB: back to topic!!  
EB: so basically what i was saying is you're a lame loser who can't move his butt from his computer chair and has never been kissed, and i've been french kissed at spill the bottle.  
TG: but did you get your dick wet  
EB: ...what.  
TG: obviously you werent listening like at all today i tried to tell you bro  
TG: other people are all about the getting their dicks etc wet  
TG: other people as in dudes and chicks you see every day  
TG: the girl sitting next to you in math is not a virgin egbert  
EB: it's not that i didn't get what you were trying to say?? it's just that i really don't care about how much sex my classmates have.  
EB: i just wouldn't go from touching lips to fucking in the four hours a birthday party lasts.  
EB: i mean, other people can do that all they want.  
TG: you should be able to hear my soulful sigh all the way in your room  
TG: youre never going to get laid  
EB: well then so be it? it's not as if sex is my life goal or anything. and also quit acting as if you're the town bicycle.  
TG: well not having everyone ride me is a conscious choice for me but you couldnt if you tried  
EB: ignoring that i just said it was a conscious choice, of course.  
TG: but seriously have you never wished you werent abstinent  
EB: usually my own two hands are good enough.  
TG: how can you say that when you dont know how mine would do the job  
EB: i imagine they'd do exactly the same job?  
EB: i mean, your hands are also just that. hands.  
EB: and thanks for the mental image.  
TG: ok first of all  
TG: i call blasphemy my hands are obviously magic  
TG: and what kind of mental image idfk what you could mean by that  
EB: the image of you jerking off. with your magic hands.  
EB: which is something i never wanted to think about!  
TG: if you dont want to think about it why are you bringing it up huh  
TG: stop lying to yourself  
TG: and never pride yourself on having an accurate mental image of that  
TG: its impossible  
EB: well, i might not know what you look like. but i sure know what you sound like!  
TG: so thats what you get off to  
EB: yes, dave. in times of desperation, in the middle of the night, your girlish moans are all i can think of.  
TG: thats all i needed to know  
TG: phase two can be initiated  
TG: the countdown is ticking down as were speaking  
TG: i am taking the mission to save this gift bestowed upon humanity on my shoulders  
TG: you will emerge a better man from this  
TG: the man you were meant to be  
EB: what is being initiated?  
EB: the time in your life where you can't take your hands out of your pants and become a giant asshole in general?  
EB: because if yes, i'm afraid you're a bit late with the countdown.  
TG: how can you not suspect this in the slightest  
TG: this is fucking ridiculous  
TG: egbert  
TG: you have a porno dick  
EB: what.  
TG: see the fact that you dont know that just makes my point more important  
TG: with great dicks comes great responsibility  
TG: or something like that  
TG: and you just intended to ignore that and let it hang there sad and unused  
TG: i intend to change that  
EB: and how would you do that?  
TG: understandable that you still dont get it i mean its not as if i basically spelled it out in detail up there  
EB: no, i got that you were typing your sordid fantasies about me. but how would you convince me to do that in real life?  
TG: by reminding you of who youre talking to  
TG: who would say no to the chance to fuck me  
EB: oh right, i forgot how insanely attracted to you i am. your squeaky voice, your twinky body, i just can't stand it anymore.  
EB: oh, when can we meet?  
TG: call my manager to make an appointment  
EB: hah, and you're trying to tell me you're being serious.  
TG: no i am really serious  
EB: no, you're really not serious.  
EB: because that would be a really dumb thing to be serious about even for you.  
TG: ok i can see that this is getting nowhere so  
TG: i guess ill just call it a night  
TG: try again tomorrow  
EB: right, let's see if fucking me is more possible on a tuesday.  
TG: just to be clear i meant the other way around  
TG: see you wouldnt even have to worry about anything  
EB: what's the other way around even supposed to mean? isn't fucking a two-way street?  
TG: maybe look at it as a tunnel and a train  
EB: oh.  
EB: oh my god.  
TG: yeah now you got it  
TG: sweet dreams

\-- turntechGodhead [TG]  ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 22:56 --

The next day at school there wasn't any obvious indicator that John remembered. Dave almost believed he'd hallucinated the whole thing. The whole dreadful thing, which had made him sweat and summon the willpower he had stored in long forgotten crevices of his mind to keep typing at a normal speed. To even keep saying the things he was saying, when there was the familiar mindset telling him to stop pretending to be serious about anything.

It would have been easy to stop trying at this point. All Dave's friends had experienced him refusing to drop a particular, unimportant topic, only to never speak of it again. That's what John apparently assumed it to be.

But Dave really didn't want to let it go. Because no matter what it was about, it had been two years, maybe more, since he'd felt that strong a need to do something, to not just sit back and see what would transpire on its own.

The probability was too high that on its own, nothing at all would transpire.

Before he had the chance to turn his shiny new determination into action, he was confronted by Rose in English. He hadn't replied to her messages from Saturday, and he hadn't planned on doing so. Dave had kind of forgotten about them. There were more pressing matters to deal with than his friends worrying about him – he knew he was okay, he was the same as always, and if he just let it be, Rose would have to acknowledge that and find something more worthy of wasting her time with. But for now, she wouldn't leave him alone.

Dave was lost in thought about how he could approach the other issue later on- not that it mattered much. There was no perfect solution, and he told himself he'd just have to rely on his improvisation skills, and hope that his vocal chords wouldn't suddenly stop cooperating (like they sometimes did when he forced himself to voice sentences that a part of his mind wanted to never leave the confines of his head). Stuttering just took away most of the work he put into trying to look calm and indifferent while saying things that made his insides coil in white hot anxiety.

“Don't think I overlooked you skirting around the obvious topic yesterday, Strider.”

It made Dave jump a little bit – not enough to alert anyone apart from Rose, who was already alert anyway, but enough to almost send the pen he'd been tapping the desk with tumbling, if he hadn't managed to catch it at the last second.

“How in the world is asking you for homework avoiding any kind of subject?”

“It's not, but failing to answer my messages from Saturday most definitely is.”

The teacher chose that moment to glare at them, and Rose made a point of smiling toothily and writing something down with a flourish, to give the impression that she was paying attention. The notes she was taking were really just for show. Dave didn't need to look at her writing to know it had nothing at all to do with the lesson they were sitting in.

“I didn't notice there was anything to reply to, all I read was 'life is boring when there's no problems so I need to make some up', and that's basically what every second sentence you say is. I usually don't reply to those either, so why the fuck would I do that now?”

“I thought it couldn't hurt to try testing how you would react to someone admitting to worry about you. It was apparently a delusion to think you'd react any different.”

“Yeah, you're the queen of delusions”, Dave agreed. The only answer was a sigh and the scratching of her pen. He couldn't help but suspect he'd get to read some of that at a later point.

In their history class, Jade sat to his right. Usually, she passed the class with her hand supporting her cheek and her mouth wide open, staring at the teacher as if she had transformed into a hypnotising wheel. Today, she sat straight and looked as if she were about to start bouncing up and down, and when she poked Dave with the flipside of her pen, he felt dread rising to his throat as he wondered what had her so perky in history.

“Are you doing something this weekend?”

She had a hard time keeping her voice down, but even with the terrible half-whisper that probably carried to the very front of the classroom spoken right in his ear, he was relieved. He didn't even need to open his mouth for this. Dave shook his head.

“Cool! Do you want to hang out?”

“Sure, okay”, he answered without thinking. He knew that Jade was easy to satisfy with these things, all he had to do was agree to hang out, and even if there was no further effort to make those plans come true, she'd feel as if she'd done her part in forcing him to spend time with his friends.

And so, when her answer was nothing more than a smile, Dave knew that this time wasn't any different.

 

Both Rose and Jade had fulfilled their daily dose of doing something for Dave's wellbeing already. John wasn't as adamant as them about it, there were days where he dedicated what was obviously most of his wit to getting Dave to laugh. He succeeded maybe once a month, but it was usually not when anyone was around to hear or see.

Today was not one of those days. Today was one of the days where John seemed to dwell on a completely different plane of existence, even more so than usual. He wasn't even inattentive or unresponsive, he was the same as always. The truth was that John was always on a different plane of existence, but there were days when Dave ignored it and days when it was so obvious it was tangible in the air around him, like a perfume that created an aura instead of a smell.

By the time lunch came around, Dave was already dying to take the next step, there hadn't been any chance to yet, and he couldn't exactly say the words that sat heavy at the back of his throat in front of the girls.

Just as a catalyst, Dave told himself, he'd resort to texting again. 

He pulled out his phone under the table. Fortunately, his phone could sometimes read his mind, because he didn't have a clue what to write.

“I was wondering whether you would like to fuck”, the text read, and it was perfect. It was perfect because it was what he really wanted to say, what he meant, but it didn't sound like himself at all, and without context, it would have been a sincere, if weird, way to say that, but no one who received a text like that from him could ever take it seriously but he meant it and – alright, he was just wasting time with his thumb hovering over the send button.

“Who are you texting?”, John asked from across the table. It was a friendly, curious question.

“Your Mom”, Dave answered as he pressed send.

In a sudden turn of events, it was John's phone that vibrated in his pocket, not his mother's.

For a moment, he stared at the screen, mouth open in surprise. But then the meaning, and the not-meaning, and all the unsaid, implicit meanings in between caught up with him, and they might not all have reached the very center of his mind, but it was enough to make him grin.

To make him laugh, even, just a short stupid little giggle, but the effect was more in his eyes anyway, and Dave could see the way they crinkled at the edges even from where he was sitting and – if making people laugh always felt this much like winning a gold medal in the Olympics, he wouldn't mind being a comedian in a late night show.

“So?”, Dave asked. John typed a short reply and put his phone away with a smug smile on his face.

Fortunately, the girls generally had better things to do than worry about every single silly thing the boys did, and there was little more reaction than a suspicious look or two. Dave was left to his own devices, and he let his phone battery almost die, because he didn't want to let the screen black out.

The little bubble on his phone screen that he kept pushing up, just to look at it a little longer, read “well, keep wondering!”

All the evidence was there that he'd gotten the point across, finally, but there was still the nervous squirming in the depths of his stomach that told him to make sure. But how? He'd began typing responses to the text more than a few times, but nothing sounded quite right after that.

They all took different buses home, which was usually annoying, but today that meant Dave would get a few minutes alone with John.

It was the last opportunity he was going to get that day, he was aware, and that was the only reason he managed to grab John's arm. There was no eloquent way to say it stored away in the language-wired parts of his brain, so Dave let his tongue run away with what he wanted to convey.

“You know I meant that, right,” was all that came out, and Dave had to resist the urge to cringe. There was no way he could have fucked up more, this was exactly what he wanted to say.

But it had been the right thing to say. The easy smile fell from John's face, only a trace left, and it looked a bit too much like he was starting to believe Dave.

“But... why?” he asked, his eyebrows drawn together as if the world had been turned upside down and he now had to walk with his head hanging into the universe's infinite abyss, and he did not understand, because science had not yet found the answer as to why the laws of physics changed from time to time, and hadn't even begun to look for why people sometimes wanted to have sex with their friends.

“I didn't wax poetic about your dick for nothing yesterday,” Dave said, and slowly let John's arm go, because there didn't seem to be the risk of him running away without knowing what was going on anymore.

“You. You _meant_ that?!”

Dave nodded. His flight instinct was kicking in, this was coming dangerously close to the territory that had “too gay” written above the entrance in flashing red letters, “at least in broad daylight” added as an afterthought.

John's face might have been getting a little red, and he felt it mirrored in his own cheeks, but then again Dave didn't want to look too closely, and winter was fast approaching, so it might have just been the chilly autumn air that made their faces heat up.

For once, the shitty and mostly ignored bus schedule proved itself useful as Dave's bus screeched to a halt behind him just as he opened his mouth to explain exactly how he had meant that – that would not have been a good idea, he realized once he'd forced out a hasty goodbye and found himself a seat inside.

 

Dave had just resolved to shut off his computer – attempting to do more homework wasn't an option anymore, he'd already spent more than half an hour on the internet, keeping up with the times or wasting it, and his friends were all offline.

He'd had aimless chats with both Rose and Jade, but John hadn't been online all afternoon.

That happened sometimes. It wasn't so unusual an occurrence to get worried over, at least. People tended to forget certain things, or have more important obligations from time to time, and Dave knew that his friends weren't immune to that.

Still, it wouldn't do any good to stare at the greyed-out name, he couldn't hypnotise a computer program. His intent staring was maybe the reason why his heartbeat jumped in his throat when that name did start blinking. He'd been sent a single word.

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 22:04 --

EB: okay.  
TG: well thats a weird way to start a conversation  
TG: you could be agreeing to anything here  
EB: dave, you know exactly what i'm saying okay to.

\-- ectoBiologist [EB]  ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 22:07 --

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... i didn't plan on saying this, but my writing is often too subtle with these things so I guess I'll do it anyway:
> 
> It's very much intended that there's no physical description of the characters apart from remarks that the characters themselves make. This is because I'm not really one for headcanons and i literally cannot choose what i want them to look like... but also because i am tired of every fanfic enforcing the same general picture of what everyone looks like. so, feel free to imagine whatever, i'm not telling you who's taller, whose skin is darker etc.
> 
> this is mostly brought on by the "squeaky voice" and "twinky body" that john attributed to dave here (the voice being more because of puberty and stuff anyway), which doesn't say anything about what dave actually looks like, because it's a subjective assessment by his friend (and words can mean lots of things anyway).
> 
> (also that line is sponsored by qkind, who continues to make this trainwreck twice as funny as if i didn't have her help)


	3. It Starts with Me and It Ends with You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a great idea and you know its true  
> It starts with me and it ends with you  
> We gotta redefine what is new  
> Start at the end, I gotta hand it to you
> 
> -Cardboard Room, Math the Band

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're expecting porn, you're at the wrong place. expect lots of secondhand embarassment instead.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 16:21 --

TT: You looked happy today.  
TG: what are you talking about my face was the same as always  
TG: impervious and handsome as fuck  
TT: Let me rephrase that: Today, at times your visage was slightly more agreeable than on usual days. It might have been because your lips seemed to try to imitate that thing people sometimes do when pleasant thoughts cross their mind.  
TG: do you mean the thing where the corners turn up  
TT: I meant lips pulling back in a vicious snarl to reveal fanged teeth bared at the promise of sinking into warm flesh. But that works too.  
TG: well good cause ive never done either of those things  
TG: and i dont plan to  
TT: You were definitely smiling more than once. Although I can only hope I will be forgiven for calling this expression a smile, the sentiment is the same.  
TG: so maybe i was thinking about something hilarious  
TG: do you expect me to start laughing my ass off in class every time i think of the latest lolcat  
TT: No, but you could at least think to share this pinnacle of comedy with your dearest friends.  
TT: Or anything else that might make you emote in a positive way.  
TG: you know i dont have to tell you anything right  
TG: and even though i know your favourite thing to do is creep on my every move  
TG: you should try to force yourself to think about something thats not me once in a while  
TT: You're right, there are indeed things to do that will prove to be more profitable than trying to get anything substantial out of you.  
TT: There is no obligation to tell me anything, and you never do that anymore in any case.  
TT: I just wish you would.  
\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 16:39 --  
TG: what  
TG: way to make me feel good about myself  
TG: maybe i just dont want to use someone elses brain as a scientific journal for my emotions  
TG: where every peak is interpreted to mean the second coming of christ  
TG: oh my god his levels of happy hormones were a shitload higher than normal today  
TG: wherein a shitload refers to how much mosquitoes shit aka its so fucking small its almost nonexistant  
TG: the world must be coming to an end because dave just nearly escaped smiling today

\-- turntechGodhead [TG]ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 16:44 --  


The secret to doing anything ever is to pretend it's exactly the right thing.

With steps sure enough and a face void of guilt, walking through a door with "entry forbidden" plastered on it in plain sight, in daylight, in a place where someone could pass by at any moment, was an easy feat.

There was nothing intrinsically illegal about buying condoms or lube. Even if Dave was still technically too young for that sort of thing, and probably looked like it too, there were thousands of unsexy things to do with everything in that aisle. People wouldn't look at him and assume he was having sex, they were more likely to assume he was going to decorate his door frame with condom balloons for his birthday. He wasn't sure which assumption sat better with him.

(People were not going to assume anything, he was just one in a hundred teenage boys who bought safe sex accessories in this supermarket that week. But this fact wasn't exactly consoling to him.)

Dave managed to complete this mission without so much as an unnecessary gesture, arguably succeeding in walking as if he owned the place. Only when the automatic door closed behind him did he realize that it might have been even more suspicious for him to be so efficient in his efforts, he should have wandered around, taken a basket and filled it with other things as well, pretended to not know exactly what he wanted.

The cashiers leaning over the aisles and whispering things about him, sending dirty looks out the door after him, manifested in a vision before his eyes, and he felt so useless.

In the real world, there were no dangers he had any chance to win against. The time Jade had almost failed history, when Rose had barely escaped being run over by a bus, when the show they'd all watched when they were eleven had been canceled without any resolution, those weren't opponents frightened by a sharp blade. Even the anxieties that had sunk their claws deep into his neck years ago and would not let go didn't show any signs of mortality. And there was no way anyone would count threatening to impale chattering cashiers on a sword as self defense.

(Not that he wanted to _kill_ anyone. It would just be nice to see something in people's eyes when they looked at him that was neither indifference nor pity, even if it was fear.)

 

It wasn't a usual occurrence that things fell into place without much effort, but this once, Dave felt like that might just be the case.

After he'd received the official okay, there had been that short surreal moment where he felt like screaming out of his window in relief, or dance around his room to one of the songs buried in his music library, saved under inconspicuous names, dance around with his arms high in the air like he never would and a grin so wide on his face it would probably have hurt him.

He didn't do any of those things, he only allowed himself to pump his fist in the air and smile a bit, because he could never know who was watching.

Usually his room was safe enough – but Dave didn't want to risk anything. That was also why, when they came to discuss when and how and most importantly where, he knew _not here_.

The incredible thing here was that John's father apparently had a chance for a promotion if he took part in training workshops that conveniently took place on weekends.

Weekends. As in, plural. There would be more than one.

John was at least as enthusiastic about Dave coming over for every single one of those weekends as Dave felt. Maybe even more so.

It was easy to forget what they were talking about in detail, somehow, it was as if they were planning a sleepover, which was nothing they hadn't done before. Maybe that was why it didn't faze Dave that there were topics they grazed that preparations for normal sleepovers definitely didn't include.

The conversation flew without unnatural breaks, there wasn't any chance to think too much about things, and it felt like the old times. Old times when everything had been easy and no conversation complicated, especially not with John. But then again, lately Dave had sometimes been visited by the creeping suspicion that those old times had maybe never existed outside his head.

 

It was Friday and Dave was telling himself that he wasn't nervous. He certainly didn't look nervous, that's at least what every reflection he checked in told him. Which was every single reflection on his way to the bus stop, in the bus, and then from the bus stop he got off at to John's house. Or rather, to the car owned by the people two houses over, where he stood for ten minutes, pulling at his hair and attempting to slow his breathing.

He wasn't even breathing much faster than normal, but he was painfully aware of the way his chest rose and sank, and being aware that he was in a functioning human body made where exactly he was headed too real.

The door was opened before Dave had even raised his hand to knock or ring the doorbell. He slid past John, who greeted in a voice that rang too loud in Dave's ears and raised his arms expectantly. But Dave ignored it, barely managing a “hey” before he collapsed on the couch, bag flung somewhere by his feet.

There'd been no car outside the house, no one else was inside, Dad Egbert had obviously already left, and they were alone.

Dammit. Dave's leg started bouncing again.

John sat down beside him and let out a strangled kind of sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan.

“What?”, Dave asked. His fingers had started twitching again, too.

“How do you expect us to have sex if you can't even hug me?”

He'd scooted a bit closer, still far enough so that Dave could stretch his arm out and just barely touch him, but the distance was cut in half by his heightened senses, the words almost spoken right in his ear, and Dave bristled.

“That's bullshit, of course I can hug you-”

“Then, prove it?”

The words alone might have been easy to mistake for a challenge, even though there was nothing challenging about hugging, but the tone sure didn't sound like that. Before, John had sounded indignant, maybe still bewildered at the way Dave had just stormed inside the house, but there was nothing left of that in his voice.

His voice sounded the way the hopeful smile on his lips looked, and Dave found himself scooting closer to the inviting arms, because there was no way he'd turn down a challenge like that.

It had been a while since he and John had really hugged, and hugging someone when you're sitting down makes for a different brand of hugging. Those hugs tend to last a bit longer.

Dave was reminded of the time in fifth grade when during a tickle fight (which he hadn't initiated, maybe provoked, but not initiated), John had become too tired (or bored, who knew) to continue, and announced a changing of the rules to “who can stand a hug the longest”. Dave had complained, but not backed out, and they managed to stay with their arms around each other on the very same couch they were sitting on now for half an hour, until John fell asleep and Dave had to pry him off of himself.

The difference was that then, John's clothes had been soaked in the smell of two days' worth of meals, and Dave had been in desperate need for a shower, but now they were both freshly showered, and Dave at least knew that he was scrubbed so meticulously that he wouldn't be surprised if he started to glitter.

This was not a hug that lasted for half an hour. Dave wasn't sure if he was glad or disappointed, because the contact was calming but also made him queasy in a different way than before. It had just been simmering at the back of his mind, but the direction this evening was headed wasn't that easy to dismiss anymore.

It was true that he hadn't even really kissed anyone, and even though a tiny part of him kept screaming that he could just give up and call himself stupidity personified, he wouldn't be satisfied with kissing or handjobs or whatever today.

And if he knew exactly what he couldn't go home without, why not just get it over with?

(Even though he felt his stomach scrunch up even more than it had been before at the thought of getting completely naked _right now_. Dave was, unfortunately, no matter how much he tried not to be, aware that theory was always so far away from real life it might have been imported from a different universe.)

When it was time to pull away from the hug, Dave didn't take his arms from their position around John's back. He was met with a confused glance and John opened his mouth, probably to let out a just as confused “what”, if Dave hadn't made clear exactly what by leaning forward.

The confused look intensified, and then vanished completely. Some other expression took its place, but Dave couldn't identify it, because there was a hand in his face.

Coupled with the “Dude, _no_ ” that came right after, that was hard to misunderstand.

(Had that been an amused or an annoyed or an angry _no_? Dave couldn't differentiate between those anymore with John lately, they seemed to blend together and form a huge, disgusting blob of emotion, as if someone had mixed three different kinds of bubblegum together in utter boredom and discovered that they wouldn't come apart anymore.)

Dave pulled away as quickly as he could and scooted away again.

“So, did I completely misinterpret everything we talked about the last three days or-”

“Maybe you did, because I can't remember saying something about going from awkward hugs to making out in ten seconds. You're staying the night! By which I mean that we have loads of time to do other things-” he poked Dave's shoulder with more force than a single finger should be able to hold - “and you're also really tense.”

Dave had thought knowing that in his immediate future was a round of what was surely to be very messy, possibly unpleasant buttsex, with someone who surely didn't know more about it than him and was prone to hurting others without meaning to would make him even more anxious the more hours passed without anything pertaining to that activity happening.

But that wasn't the case.

Being distracted actually did help, even if he was never completely distracted. Underneath the nervousness, he dug out anticipation, still carried over from the fateful dream he'd had nearly a week ago.

The afternoon passed away quickly with shitty video games that were more of a background noise to a plethora of nonsensical discussions Dave couldn't remember the topic of five minutes later, and it was good that way, because it was almost exactly how he'd passed most of his Friday afternoons in his preteen years. The same determination to either win or distract John enough so he'd lose, and the same best friend beside him, even if he snorted more often than he laughed nowadays.

Dave let himself be convinced to make dinner from scratch. It was a good decision, not necessarily because it tasted like security and love like any homecooked meal should, but more because the kitchen and everything in it (save for Dave himself, thanks to a miracle or maybe his natural reaction of shying away from cooking spoons still covered in tomato sauce flung his way) were covered in what should have been used to cover the spaghetti.

The most hilarious thing, somehow, was how John made a sound that was just barely recognizable as an imitation of a windshield wiper as he wiped his glasses off. Dave had been keeping a smile down-low before, but now he couldn't help but laugh.

He could vaguely remember a similar occurrence with rain, he hadn't laughed then. Right now, it was like shaking the knots out of his stomach, and the sound of his own laugh might have been foreign enough for Dave to wince at, but John grinned at him, and it didn't really matter anymore.

He didn't notice the red blob of sauce landing on his forehead until it slid into his eye.

When they'd eaten the remaining food, the sky had gone dark, and the mood had shifted from tense and too uncomfortable for the small, obviously lived-in house to light and almost giggly with shared anticipation.

Dinner had been consumed on the couch, and Dave and John were in much the same position as three hours before, only that no words were needed as a catalyst for a hug, and Dave had pulled his knees up on the couch before John had even said “Let's make out”, which he did say, eventually, right next to Dave's ear, and he almost laughed. Because the situation was laughable, maybe, and Dave still expected to wake up or for John to reveal there were cameras all over the room, and he hadn't meant a word of what he'd said.

No matter what his subconscious was occupied with, reality painted a different picture.

Kissing was strange. Dave had never thought about how much space there always was between him and the person opposite him, but it seemed that it was a lot bigger than he'd anticipated, because he felt as if he'd been leaning forward for a minute and still there was air left between his lips and the pair he was aiming for. Also, noses were an intriguing but weird invention of evolution, there was no way he could tilt his head the right way – but he'd forgotten he wasn't alone in this endeavour. Dave had thought an eternity had passed, but when you're already hugging, there's not that much space left to lean forward into, and with a combined effort, their lips met.

That was alright for a moment, not even very special, just another body part touching. Dave felt a flicker of what might have been disappointment, and that needed to be put out immediately, because what was there to be disappointed about? He hadn't expected fireworks to blast off or a random group of passers-by bursting into song and dance outside the door. This wasn't a romance movie. This wasn't even a romance. _Nothing_ was supposed to happen save for healthy bodily reactions of teenage boys with average hormone levels.

Dave tried to press a bit closer to crush the unwelcome feeling like dry leaves under his feet, and it was gone the moment John responded in kind, because that did feel kind of nice, but then there was a noise that made him flinch back. Something had scratched across his shades. Dave had somehow forgotten that glasses were still a thing, maybe even more of an obstacle than noses were, and this time, he couldn't blame evolution. Evolution would have made sure that losers who depended on eyewear to survive in daily life rotted in the ground before they could produce offspring, and Dave wasn't sure if he hated or loved humanity for preventing that.

(There was a pro and a con argument, and they had been kissing seconds ago.)

It couldn't be helped. To move things along, that obstacle had to go as well. Dave took his shades off, set them on the table, and resumed the previous activity, as quickly as he could, without giving John enough time to get the idea to remove his glasses as well.

It hadn't been a conscious decision (more a result of trying to transform any hesitation into its opposite), but Dave found he liked that the glasses were still on, even if they had dug their own painful little groove in his cheek. It reminded him of whose lips were on his, whose breath he was sharing, whose hands were in his hair – when had that happened? It didn't matter, it was still comforting.

A pact between best friends to get rid of their virgin status together had always seemed like a cliché plot for films that didn't make it to the cinema, and Dave had always thought it would be easier to have sex with someone he didn't know and would never have to see again than with someone he would have to look in the eyes afterwards, because so much could go wrong, so much that shouldn't be mentioned ever again. But the way this was going (and despite the fingers admiring the feathery layers on the back of his neck, it couldn't be called making out) just with the relatively chaste kissing Dave was glad that the last week had let up to this situation. No one had ever told him he needed to be in love with someone to kiss them and enjoy it, but there was a thing about kissing someone he'd been comfortable with for more than a few hours that made him forget there was still a social taboo around platonic love-making.

The hand on the back of his head prompted Dave to put his hand in much the same position in John's hair, and he put a little pressure in, too. He had been patient all afternoon, and there was no reason to be anymore. The tongue battling might as well begin.

The issue here was only that Dave didn't really know what he was doing, or maybe he did, but the connection between his brain and the nerves controlling his mouth was lost. John did know what he was doing, though, and Dave let his lips be gently nudged open only with the thought that the next few steps along the line, they both wouldn't have anything else to lean on but general knowledge and instincts that he could only hope existed.

Open-mouthed kissing was a change he welcomed, it was easier to get enough oxygen, and that together with the little spark of something, probably overstimulated nerves, made Dave brave enough to let his hands wander a bit, not to any spectacular places he'd never touched before. He knew exactly how John's hair felt against his fingers, he could feel in the way it glid between them how long it had been since he'd taken a shower, he knew how long it took for his hands to slide from his neck to the outside of his arms. There was nothing new about it, John hadn't suddenly grown wings or a beard in the few hours they hadn't seen each other, but it made Dave weirdly proud that he had permission to do this, just by being him, and by having asked.

When he tried to use his tongue, though, he managed to make a move where he could as well have licked a broad stripe up John's chin, and Dave found himself shoved away and laughed at. Struggling to sit up again from his half-lying position, he kicked John in the shin – or more, pushed his foot into his leg, where it was already resting. He might not be a very graceful kisser, but he _was_ trying.

With some effort, Dave pushed himself up and decided that the best way to both keep the laughter at his poor helpless state inside of John's mouth and the still slightly disgusted look off his face was to just kiss him again. So that's what he did, this time around not even hesitating to open his mouth.

He had to put a lot of effort into moving his tongue the right way, and he wasn't even sure what the right way was. It was too exhausting, too calculated, at least at the moment. He'd even started to feel a little blood flow downwards before, with the pleasant tingles that ran down his spine, but that was gone now.

Until he realized that there wasn't much space between them now, their chests almost pressed together, and one of his legs thrown over one of John's. The picture of ridiculousness they would have been to anyone looking right now, especially to people who knew them, overlapped with the closeness and the warmth of another human being he felt, and he thought of how much warmer and closer everything would be later.

If that wasn't the stirrings of a long-missed erection, Dave might as well have called himself a saint and sworn off all worldly pleasure for the rest of his life.

He disentangled his tongue from John's and pulled back a little bit. Dave would have liked it if he'd done that with the intention to do something else, like kiss the neck he was currently assaulting with his unsteady breathing, because that was the sexy thing to do, or even to say something hilarious. Even saying something stupid would have been better than this, but his mind had shut off coherent thought for a minute. All he could register was the inability of his muscles to keep him sitting upright in the middle of the couch, so he let himself fall to the side, and slide, until his head rested comfortably on the back of the couch. Apparently getting a boner close enough to another person for them to notice it, because of another person that was even probably close enough to _feel_ it made him incapable of letting much more than horrible heavy breaths escape his mouth.

John might not have fared much better than him, but Dave couldn't hear a lot over the rush of blood in his ears.

No matter how affected he was, John copied the way Dave was sitting, pushed his glasses up his nose again, and made a few sounds that were obviously him searching for something to say.

Dave desperately longed for a word, any word, to leave his lips. He found that he was unable to reach any that made any sense.

“That was...” John trailed off. Descriptions were hard, especially accurate one-word descriptions, especially if they had to be born out of the spur of the moment.

“The bomb”, Dave managed to supply. He kind of wished he hadn't, in his current state he couldn't arrange his thoughts enough to think about whether he had managed to subvert the trope or if he had walked right into another romance cliché. The picture of the heavily panting, naked couple, panting post-coitus, finishing each others sentences to reassure both each other and the pitiable person enjoying the scene that their night had, in fact, been the bomb, wouldn't leave his mind now, no matter how often he pointed to the door. It was not how he wanted to envision this night going.

“Yep”, John agreed, and continued without even acknowledging the laughter that sounded through his words, “Do you want to move upstairs?”

Dave couldn't help that his first reaction was the equivalent in facial expressions to “fuck yeah”. He said it, too, for good measure.

There was no use now in trying to play that down, his face was out in the open and John was already laughing at him, maybe at the weirdly crooked smile on his face, or maybe because he failed twice to sling the strap of his back over his shoulder. John followed him up the stairs, still laughing a bit.

“It's kind of creepy how eager you are, dude”, he said from about two steps below Dave. And here he'd hoped there wouldn't be any comments.

“You lost the right to complain about that by agreeing”, Dave said as he reached the last step, “Should have read the small print.”

“Oh man, I can't believe I fell for the oldest trick in the book.”

There were a short few seconds that it was still dark in John's room after Dave had opened the door – damn the light switch for being so elusive – and he felt a hand on his butt. It was gone before the light had flickered on, but it had startled Dave enough for him to drop his bag and entangle his legs in it in a futile attempt to make out his attacker. He just barely managed not to trip, and when he looked up, to much blood already rushing to his face, John was sitting on his bed. He wasn't even laughing, just grinning broadly, and somehow that was worse.

Dave wasn't exactly angry, but it was enough of an annoyance for him to decide to ignore the hand with which John was patting the bed beside him. He walked over, and sat down right in his lap.  
At least that surprised some of the smugness off John's face, but the position was extremely awkward. Dave's legs were too long to fit completely on the bed this way, and crossing them behind John's back would probably be even more awkward. At the same time, he felt as if he was going to fall over backwards at any moment, they were too close to the edge of the bed.

“What the fuck did you think you were doing”, Dave said as indignantly as he could, mostly to mask that it was hard to maintain his balance.

“I thought we could add a paragraph about butt touching privileges to the contract”, John answered, again with that grin from before, “Even though yours is sort of bony.”

“What, that's-”

“And what did you think you were doing sitting down like that? The bed is big enough for two.”

Despite the words implying that John wanted them to both lie down, he shifted around with Dave still in his lap and let himself fall backwards once there was enough of his legs on the bed to put his feet up on the pillow.

Dave found himself staring down at a face that very clearly told him he was expected to do something. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. So he just leaned down and connected their lips again, because at least he knew how to do that now. He didn't really know how to do anything else.

Perhaps it wasn't normal for this situation to want to kiss so much and not move on to something more exciting, but Dave told himself he didn't care. He liked it, so he was doing it.

He couldn't do a lot with his hands, or he'd risk falling over, but there was soon a hand in his hair, tugging him just on the edge of being painful, turning his head to make deepening the kiss easier. Dave couldn't help the small surprised sound that escaped him. It wasn't a sound another person would have heard, not unless they were impossibly close and right up against his lips. Which was unfortunately the case, but at least he wouldn't give John the opportunity to think or say anything about it.

He tried the tongue-prodding thing, and it still felt so foreign to do something so precise with his tongue that he almost pulled away to groan in frustration. But it also earned him a sound similar to the one he'd made seconds before, so he allowed himself to grin into the kiss a bit.

(Any kind of sound John was producing was better than the ones Dave was holding back, because he wasn't keeping them locked away tightly.)

A second hand joined the hand in Dave's hair, the first one wandered to his hip, and then up under the back of his shirt. The hand wasn't even that cold, but he shied back anyway.

Whatever Dave had wanted to say came out as little more than an unidentifiable syllable mix. He'd sat down at a strategically disadvantaged point for his current state of mind. In Dave's quest to momentarily escape the hand that was threatening his personal shield of clothes that was still intact for now, he'd scooted back to sit right atop John's crotch.

In all honesty, in the last few days, the reason for why all this was happening had been pushed to the very back of his mind. The Saturday with the fateful towel slip had found the most comfortable niche in Dave's memories where he wouldn't have found it on his own, but where it was still sending more or less cryptic messages to his subconscious to be processed in his dreams.

In other words, there was a boner there, a boner that left Dave with a very conflicting mixture of eager anticipation and that well-known brand of gut-twisting nervousness.

It must have shown on his face, because John was already laughing at him, or more quietly wheezing with closed eyes, because he was also visibly affected. But then he opened his eyes, focused on Dave's face, and found something in the expression there that didn't go well with being amused.

“You know that it's okay if you want to stop, right?”

“The fuck, I started this, why would you think I want to stop?”

“Uh, maybe... because of your face?!”

Dave actually took a moment to consider it, even through the fog that filled his thoughts with the empty conviction that he didn't have the _right_ to say he wanted to stop. Because it had been his idea, yes, and also because he was a boy, and boys were supposed to be eager and jump at every opportunity to have sex. He knew that was absolute bullshit on some level, especially because this wasn't the kind of sex most teenage boys imagined themselves to have, where they'd stick their dick into a more or less random vagina and be gone after ten minutes. Still, Dave was relieved when he didn't find a single thought that screamed for him to stop, just the same old ones, telling him to hurry up or slow down, to let his shirt be pulled off or to do it himself.

John was still looking at him as if he would bolt out of the room and throw up at any moment, and that was not an expression that Dave wanted to see on his face. There wasn't space for any expression that could have a negative connotation on John's face. He wouldn't have to deal with the consequences and the pre-sequences. He didn't have anything to worry about, and that was exactly how it was supposed to be.

“Nah, stopping is the farthest thing from my mind. My face is the same as always, must have been a trick of the light.”

John accepted it with a shrug, but didn't look too convinced, so Dave told his hesitancy to go fuck itself up the ass with a cucumber and threw it out the window together with all the unwanted emotional baggage. He took off his shirt in a single fluid motion and flung it wherever it would land.

This wherever was, as all laws of physics could have predicted, John's face, which took away a bit of the effect. What kind of effect he'd intended, Dave didn't know exactly, maybe something along the lines of determination and to retain a bit of sexiness. If there had ever been any sexiness involved, which the sensible part of his brain doubted.

Instead, he'd prompted John to jerk in instinctual response to having something thrown at him. When it caught up with his brain that the shirt had already landed, he used the arms he'd lifted to prevent the impact to take off his shirt as well, a bit less graceful, because that was a bit hard when you were laying down and also still had to pay attention not to tangle your glasses in with the mess. But he managed, and threw the messy ball of their combined shirts back at Dave.

“Don't do that, I don't need a face full of your smell.”

“You'll be smelling me much closer soon.”

Oh fuck, what was up with his higher brain functions today? Even if he hadn't tried to wiggle his eyebrows along with it, that line had been a bit too creepy. Dave didn't even want to look at John's face to see his reaction. He got up and walked over to his bag. Sadly, he had to wobble a bit, because there wasn't a lot of blood left for his legs.

“What are you doing?”

“Invading Poland. What does it look like?”

“Well, it looks as if you're searching for something in your bag and not finding it.”

That was, unfortunately, very close to the truth. The condoms were there alright, the shape of their package under his fingers made Dave vividly remember how he'd felt when he bought them, and he did not want to remember that, especially now, when he'd thought the nervousness had started to subside. The lube didn't seem to be there at all, though, and Dave tried to think back whether he'd maybe forgotten to pack it.

He prayed to every nonexistant deity that he hadn't left it at home. Everything would be over too quickly if he had.

John cleared his throat in what was obviously an attempt to get Dave to pay attention to him, not to get rid of something blocking his throat.

“Is this maybe the thing you're looking for?”

Dave turned around without expecting too much, at least nothing sensible.

John was holding something that seemed to be, according to its size, shape, and general appearance to be a bottle of lube of the same brand Dave had bought.

“How did you even do that”, Dave wondered aloud.

“Do what? I bought this” - he shook the bottle for emphasis - “I just took a guess, and it turns out I was right!”

Dave wasn't oblivious to the way the sides of John's eyes crinkled as if he had just told the joke of millennia, only that no one had understood the punchline yet.

“Yeah... you guessed, right. Obviously.”

He ignored any other inquiries in favor of kicking his shoes off and unbuttoning his pants.

John sat the bottle to the side and watched Dave take his jeans off as if he was watching a group of flamingos standing around on a trip to the zoo.

Dave ignored that he was being watched as best as he could, and managed to sit down on the bed again in his underwear. The socks were still on as well, so he tore them off and flung them wherever they would land. He would not be keeping his socks on.

The plan was to just throw his boxers off the same way, but that was proving to be a bit more difficult with the way John was looking at him as if he was a relatively interesting piece on display in a museum, not a living human being stripping in preparation for having sex with him. Because then he might have been a bit more embarrassed and less scrutinizing.

It was impossible to pretend it wasn't bothering Dave at all, he could feel his cheeks flush more than they should be able to with how much of his blood was, despite everything, still occupied with other places.

(He considered that he might just be getting off on being watched, but it wasn't the kind of watching where the watcher was finding it hard to breathe normally and take their eyes off the one they were watching because they were too hot to exist on this planet. It was the kind of watching a scientist might do to a lab rat that was showing a formerly unheard of behaviour.)

Dave came to the conclusion that the only way to break this stalemate was to get it over with. He slipped his thumbs under the waistband, lifted his hips a bit, took a deep breath, and off the underwear went. On instinct, and because he was starting to get irritated, he flung the boxers right in John's face instead of discarding them on the floor somewhere. For maybe two seconds he wondered if he was overdoing it with throwing things at people. Then he told himself that there was no such thing as overdoing throwing things at people, especially if those things were his own clothes and there was only one victim, who deserved everything that was coming his way.

While John was occupied with prying the offending article off of himself, Dave rolled over so that he was lying on the bed right side up, with an actual pillow under his head, and managed to grab the bottle from the nightstand, but not do much else, before John had turned around and was facing him again.

“So, what are you doing, now that you're naked?”

Disregarding the words, it sounded as if he wanted to discuss the steps of a shared class project, and Dave tried his hardest to feel nothing about it or at least find it amusing, but he was irritated, for reasons he would rather not analyse.

“Seriously, are you telling me you bought that thing without knowing what to do with it. We went over the basics like three damn times - “

“No, no I get the technicalities but, I mean. Are you just going to put that tube up your butt, or what.”

Dave had silently hoped that he'd somehow be able to subtly convince John to turn around for a minute so he could take care of his business, but he should have known that it was a futile hope. It looked like he'd have to put on a show instead.

The only comforting thought was that it wasn't the first time he'd do this, and he was already naked, so there was nothing about his body that could still elicit a negative response. Well, almost nothing. But he wasn't thinking about that.

Dave averted his eyes to the ceiling and tried to make himself believe that he was in his own room, alone, and there was no one watching him stick a slick finger up his butthole.

There was someone there, though, and it was making Dave uneasy how hard that was to ignore, even though John wasn't making any sounds apart from the ones that came with simply existing.

As soon as he was up to two fingers, not knowing what John's face looked like had grown worse than the fear of perhaps finding disgust there. Dave propped himself up as best as he could with only one hand. John was wearing an expression not that different from before, not disgust, but also not lust or anything despicable like that.

He was just sitting there, shirtless, looking at Dave sodomizing himself, mostly unaffected apart from his rosier-than-usual cheeks and his erection, but that had been there before, so all that Dave could say was that he hadn't made it disappear. John might even have helped along a bit himself, there'd been quiet clothing rustling that Dave hadn't thought much of, but his hand was nowhere near his crotch anymore, so maybe that was only wishful thinking.

“Is that enough of a demonstration for you”, Dave asked, and tried his best not to look too distressed at how spent his voice sounded already.

“You know that I didn't actually think you'd shove that bottle up your ass, right, that would've been stupid.” He grinned down at Dave. “I just wanted to see you get worked up.”

Dave suddenly became aware of the position of his right foot, which had slid to rest against one of John's knees, and to retaliate, Dave stretched his leg until his foot rested against John's crotch instead.

“You sure did.” He pressed his foot down.

That might have been a bad idea for retaliation, because all that Dave got out of it was the realization of how fucking tiny his fingers were, at least in relation, and it didn't seem to have much of an effect on John apart from making him jolt. He recovered quickly, and before Dave had blinked twice, he'd grabbed his foot and was bending his knee back.

“What do you want me to do? Help you shove your foot up your butt instead?”

To anyone with a clear mind, it would have been obvious that John didn't really mean that, but he got dangerously close to doing just what he'd said, and Dave definitely didn't have a clear mind. Even if he'd been able to think straight, he would have wanted to let him know he didn't approve.

Struggling with words he wasn't sure he was articulating right and trying to kick his leg, Dave blindly searched around for something to throw.

His hand found the lube and he felt victory upon him.

He threw the bottle and it landed exactly where it had been supposed to land, which was smack-dab in the middle of John's forehead. It had still been open, though, and as it fell to its doom between the sheets, it left a glob of lube behind to slide down John's face.

The corners of his mouth drew downwards in disgust as he reached up to prevent any further damage, letting Dave's foot go on its own way.

“Ew, that got in my hair.”

“You deserved that for trying to deflower me with my own fucking foot.”

The response was a half-hearted laugh as John stared at the lube on his fingers. His gaze trailed up to Dave, who became very aware that his fingers hadn't stopped moving.

“Do you think I should go wash my hands”, John said, “Or can I maybe. Help you?”

The answer was finished in Dave's mind before he could wrap words around it, so he found himself opening his mouth without letting more than an unintelligible sound escape, but then he forced himself to get it together. This was really nothing to get worked up about, bigger things were yet to come.

“Would be a shame if that went to waste”, he managed to half-articulate.

It was enough to get the meaning across, but John obviously wasn't sure what exactly to do with his hands, or maybe he was having second thoughts. Dave pulled his fingers out. He had to will himself to keep both the shivering that overcame him with the sensations and the wincing from the sounds that were suddenly too sexual in the room that was still a childhood escape for him to a minimum.

He wiggled his now now-free fingers around in front of him, where John was sure to see them. The air felt too cool, almost uncomfortable around them.

“Do you see that? Clean as a kitchen sponge fresh from the store.”

“I kinda doubt kitchen sponges are sold drenched in lube.”

“God damnit, clean as in sticky, but not shitty.”

That made John laugh a bit, even if he also stuck out his tongue, because that was something he probably hadn't been thinking about, and even more probably didn't want to think about. Anyway, it was enough to make him lose that last bit of hesitation, and then he was closer than he'd been since they'd been kissing, which could as well have happened centuries ago for how far away it felt.

There was enough hushed eye contact for it not to be sudden, but it was a feeling that made Dave both want to shy away never to be touched by hands apart from his own again and shimmy closer to the only reliable source of heat in the room.

He did neither, because both urges were ridiculous in their own ways. There was nothing too scandalous about having a finger up his ass, only by not being his own, it felt as if it went much deeper and touched places Dave hadn't thought existed.

He told the part of him that wanted to think about metaphysical places inside him that no soul had ever touched to go suck some dead poet's dick, and tried focusing on matters at hand, like his own dick. Which was currently not really a matter at hand, because his hands were occupied with being completely useless and limp, and as far as John was concerned, he might as well not have had a dick.

It wasn't fair to be upset about that – not to say that Dave was upset, he was more annoyed that his own hands were disobeying (but starting to randomly jerk off now would taste too much like admitting defeat, even though it wasn't a battle he was fighting). There was no contract that said anything about John having to touch his dick, and with what he was doing, he was surely doing a satisfying job.

He had no bigger trouble than what warranted furrowing his eyebrows and a wince from Dave with getting a second finger back in, and the sensation was a distinctly different one than before. There was the added thrill of not being the one to control the motions, which made up for John not knowing what else to do than copy what he'd watched Dave do to himself.

It was all taking too long for Dave. He wished there'd been a third finger in him yesterday, and he told John so, because there was no reason to pretend he didn't want other things in his ass, too, things that were definitely bigger than two measly fingers.

He was rewarded for swallowing the shame that he couldn't believe was still welling up in his mouth somehow, with a short laugh that would have sounded nervous had Dave still been paying attention to that. It was hard to pay too much attention to too many things at once, now, because the second reward was the third finger he'd wished for.

It didn't go in as easily and definitely needed more lube than the two fingers before, and the added width was lost on the depth, but it didn't really matter, because it was definitely enough to flip the switch from _not yet_ to _yes, right now, no five minutes more_.

Dave grabbed John by his belt loops and pulled him close enough to start undoing his pants. It wasn't as easy as it sounded, particularly because his hands had begun shaking from the influence of some hormone that he didn't know the name of, and weren't useful for any coordinated activity anymore. He huffed to himself.

John wasn't doing anything to help him, he was just smiling at him. Dave was about to complain, but then he leaned towards the nightstand, and John was close enough for Dave to see the few pearls of sweat not yet sliding down his face, and the jittery quality of his smile.

Something landed on the bed next to him, and before Dave had realized that it was a condom, John had pulled out a pillow from somewhere under the bed, and was attempting to place it under Dave's hips. He succeeded when Dave managed to lift them a bit, and at once the ache he hadn't even noticed building in his lower back was relieved.

“You could've done that way earlier, this pillow is fucking perfect.”

“Like a piece of a cloud under your butt?”

Dave didn't know how to respond apart from a skeptical glance.

“That's what they said in the add.”

With combined efforts, the pants were opened and shrugged to the side, underwear discarded too. So this was it, now. They were naked, not socially acceptable with the important parts still covered, also not naked born from the need to change in the same room or another necessity, not by accident, but actually naked in front of each other because they were going to fuck. It was as if someone had told Dave a joke so bad that he was obligated to laugh.

But it was not a joke. It was a definite thing that was going to happen.

John's hand groping around the bed in search for the hastily discarded condom seemed to ask _now?_ and the best way Dave knew how to answer _now!_ was to grab the item in question from where he'd never forgotten it lay.

John tried to snatch it from his hands, but Dave waved him away.

“I'll do that” he said, and instead of adding a comment that made sure it was apparent he was doing that to prevent disaster, the hesitation in his trembling hands asked _that's alright?_ and his answer was a nod.

Here was another reason he would have to build a shrine to his nervousness and sacrifice some of his not-virginal-anymore blood (which wouldn't matter, because he'd always be a virgin at heart) and maybe a banana or something. It had kept him up until he knew everything he'd never bothered to remember about condoms, and Dave felt confident enough now that he knew how to do this.

His hands weren't as steady as he'd like them to be, but the shaking wasn't so bad that someone could call his movements fumbling. He went through the procedure with almost-practiced unease, but he was proud because his hands lingered for exactly as long as they had to, not a second too long. And that was despite the pull he felt, the pull he felt to just let his fingers stay and explore. But Dave wouldn't even let himself acknowledge that he felt something less, something more than sexual towards the dick he'd just slipped a condom on, and he tried to see it as an entity separate from the boy it was attached to, because that would bring even more of more and less into the equation.

Now was also not the time to go exploring intimate areas. Dave had the promise in the back of his mind that this would not be the last time, and maybe when having sex with John wouldn't feel so surreal and hurried he'd suggest letting the idle touching continue for a while.

The final touches were left to John, and Dave let his hands fall back and watched him coat his now safely-wrapped dick in even more lube. The sight made Dave's throat constrict, and he noticed that he had slid down on the pillow behind his head because he kept subconsciously trying to push his hips closer.

He stopped that as soon as he was aware he was doing it, and then there were hands on his hips. John's face told him that he was going to say something, probably something stupid that Dave did not want to hear.

“Please tell me you're not thinking about saying anything that involves 'stick' followed by 'it in', because if you did, this is over.”

“I was actually going to ask you if you're ready.”

“Do I look unready to you”, Dave asked, and made sure to spread his legs as far as possible. He didn't even feel himself blushing anymore, it had happened too often in the last few hours.

“Okay then.”

John leaned forward on one hand, his eyes focused somewhere on Dave's forehead. And then there was a dick against his asshole and saying that he didn't want it there would have been the least true thing Dave had ever let past his lips.

His heart rate shot up again, but he dug his fingers into the bedspread and stared at the drop of sweat that was threatening to fall down on him from John's face.

It went in easier than he'd anticipated, the difference to the fingers he felt right away was the heat, not the size. Easy didn't mean quick, though, and it didn't mean absolutely pain-free, but the feeling wasn't as foreign as it could have been. It was a bit like the minutes before relief comes when you've been constipated for a long time, only the other way around, and just the same, even through the discomfort, the awaiting pleasure was palpable.

Dave was involuntarily reliving memories of past digestion mishaps, and couldn't help but roll his eyes a bit in silent exasperation at himself. He met John's eyes. Dave was glad it had happened at exactly that moment, because John was still wearing his glasses, but just barely still wearing them, they were dangling precariously on the tips of his ears. Dave had no desire to be hit in the face with a pair of glasses, not anytime, but especially not now, so he reached up and took them off to set them aside.

John wasn't moving anymore at all, and it was getting uncomfortable. The urge to move his hips around again to relieve some of the discomfort was growing steadily, and that was not the measure Dave wanted to have to resort to.

“Why the fuck did you stop?”

John blinked down at Dave as if he had just realized he was not, in fact, pushing forward anymore. Then his eyes widened almost comically.

“Oh, I think it's stuck.”

“What -”

It needed a few seconds, but then the words had reached where Dave could understand them, and he felt the beginnings of what could be a panic attack rumble around in his stomach. Wasn't he supposed to feel that first? It didn't feel any different from before, there was no terrible pain – and then he saw himself having to go to the hospital exactly like this, and, yeah, maybe that was pain -

“Whoa Dave, stop flipping your shit, I'm kidding.”

The panic attack fell to pieces and reassembled as what would have been pure fury at making him imagine horrible scenarios like that, but there was probably something in his bloodstream that turned it into a mild sort of anger.

“Are you fucking serious.”

John didn't even look sorry, and that wasn't exactly a surprise, but it still made Dave want to hit him with something. The relatively concentrated look on John's face had been replaced once again with the grin that made Dave either want to ruffle John's hair or sock him in the jaw. He never did either, obviously.

“I thought I was fucking _you_.”

The scales were tipped clearly in favour of punching him, but for the time being Dave just groaned while John was laughing almost silently at his own terrible joke.

“...but I can't really be sure, this could be anyone in my bed. I mean, I can't even see your face.”

The rest of the first hurdle was taken easily, meaning without stupid comments, but the moment where Dave could concentrate only on breathing steadily and adjusting was over before long. There was nothing left to still push in, and Dave might have given himself a mental pat on the back for making it this far, but John was looking at him as if he'd found himself in a blind alley, cornered, without a way out. Moving the way Dave was waiting for, inside someone, he was sure was an instinct that would come back to John when his higher brain functions would return from whatever plane they had ascended to. But that was taking too long, Dave was getting impatient, the dick in his ass like an itch impossible to reach, and there wasn't a lot he could do about it himself in his current position without giving up what dignity he was still clinging to.

“Just, fuck, move, it's not that hard -”

There wasn't much left of Dave's voice, it seemed to be stuck in his chest, where the spark of impatience had found a dry stack of wood and was slowly burning its way through different parts of his body. But it was enough to make John focus again, even if on the wrong part of the message.

“It kind of is, though.”

He was grinning once again, satisfied with himself, and Dave almost followed the awakened reflex to grin back, but then he understood. The look on his face made John snort, and that was a bit of movement enough, but not the kind Dave wanted.

“Move your ass”, Dave managed to hiss out with the full intention of adding a fitting insult, but John complied sooner than he'd thought, and all that left his mouth was a strangled sound of surprise and, probably, pleasure.

He shut his mouth and resolved to keep sounds like that to a rare minimum. Dave couldn't figure out what to do with his hands and his eyes and his legs. There was something telling him to wrap his legs around John's hips, but he discarded and buried that thought immediately. That was a porn star move, and he did not feel like a porn star at all. He felt like a pathetic teenager who knew no way to deal with the pleasure he had hoped for but not expected, and the few spikes of pain that he found he didn't mind as much as he'd thought. A pathetic teenager who was having a hard time looking the boy he was having sex with in the eyes.

It wouldn't do. Dave forced himself to focus on John, who turned out to be closer than Dave could remember. His hands were planted firmly under Dave's armpits, his face close enough to count the different shades in his eyes when they weren't squeezed shut in concentration and also probably pleasure. Dave almost tried to crane his neck and kiss him, but the thought was dismissed as stupid and counterproductive.

Instead, he moved his hips to help things along. There wasn't a steady rhythm in either of their movements, just rocking back and forth, but at least moving back had made John gasp a bit and clench his fingers in the sheets. It replaced a good part of physical pleasure, and Dave forgot that he wasn't supposed to be stimulated enough to feel this close to orgasm.

But he was, even more so after he told his shame to shove it and found a use for one of his hands on his own dick. And John was, too, judging by the way his finger began twitching against Dave's arm in time with his hips, that had sped up to something that could maybe be called thrusting.

It didn't last long after that, and soon Dave found himself disoriented. There was still liquid bliss in his veins, but he had become too used to the closeness in less than five minutes, and now he was too cold and empty in comparison.

He was brought back to the real world when something hit him in the head – a tissue box.

Dave forced himself to focus on John, who was grinning at him, clean and surprisingly non-sweaty, but still naked, save for - 

“Were you seriously wearing your socks through all of that.”

The way he looked down to his feet as if he had only now realized that the ridiculous striped socks were still on his feet was proof enough that exactly that was the case. John looked back up as if he didn't know what the big deal was with his socks, and expressed just that with a shrug and a snort.

Dave wasn't sure why he cared, but something about the thought that John had fucked him _while wearing socks_ made him feel like the punchline to the shittiest joke mankind had ever told, and that meant something with all the different flavours of shitty jokes he had to endure every day.

Most of all, he wanted the somehow still smug expression off John's face. All the times Dave had wanted to stuff a pillow down John's throat came back to him, and there was no use contemplating it anymore now. Dave took the pillow nearest to his hands and hit John in the face with it as hard as possible. Which wasn't very hard, considering it was a soft, downy pillow. And maybe pillow fights were girly, but who was he to care about that at this point, it was also the only suitable thing to hit John with in the near vicinity, because he didn't want to permanently damage him. There were still things in the future Dave needed John for.

They shared the bed that night. It was not the first time John and Dave had slept next to each other, but sleepovers had been rare lately, and bumping elbows and knees and breathing down each other's necks had become increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn't now. The bed was still a bit too small for two teenage boys to sleep in, but the need for personal space had been completely eradicated from Dave's mind, and John didn't protest.

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 18:16 --

GG: hey dave!  
GG: where were you, i thought we wanted to hang out :(  
TG: oh shit sorry  
TG: i forgot  
GG: yeah you should be sorry you really missed out!!  
GG: i went to this really cool mansion in the woods, it belongs to one of my friends from bio  
GG: and his family always invites people over the weekend because they have way too many rooms  
GG: there were so many interesting people and we played games and messed around with music stuff  
TG: sounds awesome  
GG: it was :D  
GG: so next time i go, all of you loners are invited!!  
TG: looking forward to it  
TG: but just fyi im not a loner  
GG: so youre telling me you didnt spend the last two days only leaving your room for the bathroom?  
GG: because i dont believe you, mr married-to-the-electronic-devices-i-own!!  
TG: actually  
TG: believe me or not but i spent friday night at johns and we had a lot of fun  
GG: wow! im proud of you :)  
GG: oh sorry but i have to go something just came up  
TG: see ya  
GG: bye!!! tell me more on monday ok <3

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 18:28 --

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternative title: "probably pleasure"


	4. As Light as a Feather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You fall apart and you pull yourself back together,  
> When you're done you always feel as light as a feather
> 
> -Blue skies and blue jeans, Math the Band

When Dave went home on Saturday in the late afternoon, he had trouble walking normally. It was more because of the unnatural ways his legs had been bent for a bit too long than because of anything else, but it was still different from how he usually walked, no matter how hard he tried to ignore his sore thigh muscles.

In any case, he definitely didn't need to worry about what people were going to assume, especially not at school. Dave could probably have walked into school covered in obvious, visible hickeys, and the farthest thing from anyone's mind would have been that he'd gotten someone to do that for him.

When the apartment door fell closed behind him and Bro was sitting, sipping something unidentifiable, in a way that was perfect for staring at whoever would cross the threshold into their apartment, he was a thousand times more aware of how gingerly he had to move, and yet, he was able to make it to his room with only a huff in answer to a stupid comment. And Dave knew it didn't mean anything. He wouldn't think anything of it, never speak of it again, forget it completely. There were better ways to drive Dave insane, and this was one of the things he was thankful for in his life. No one really cared about anything he did on a deeper level than what concerned themselves, and that was good, it was perfect, that was the way it was supposed to be, and it meant that he could fuck up whatever he wanted to and it wouldn't hurt anyone, in the long run.

Only two or three years ago, it had been a regular occurrence for Dave to go to school with heavy legs and burning arm muscles, but no one would take the limp of a twelve year old boy for a sex limp, and it was fairly clear that he was just very involved in some kind of sport that was taking a lot out of him.

Strifing sessions had been an almost daily, if very irregularly scheduled thing then, and he wasn't sure if he missed that or not – fuck that, he definitely didn't miss it. It had taken so much out of him that sometimes, at the end of the day, he'd forgotten his name, or rather, his name had become like a glossy picture of itself, photoshopped beyond recognition, blurring before his eyes until it looked more like a court order than a mere name. But it had also come with a sense of purpose, because when you're young and impressionable, not wise and mature like fifteen year old Dave, it's not hard to believe that there's something big out there, that a day will come when everything changes.

And with the way that he had felt he was almost being trained, prepared for something, the conviction built in him that it was going to happen soon, and anticipation built itself a fort and nestled comfortably in his chest. Dave put up with it, because there had to be a reason for it.

But his thirteenth and his fourteenth birthday passed, nothing happened apart from life continuing its lazy stroll down the boulevard of boring, and slowly, even Bro seemed to realize that nothing was going to happen, and that training for anything at all was useless with the boring teenager Dave turned out to be.

Only the most perceptive of students might even have noticed the way he was still walking a bit strangely on Monday, but there were almost no perceptive students, and those who noticed assumed something else.

What people, or at least Dave's friends, did notice, was that suddenly and without any evident reason, he was apparent as John's best friend again. They were as close as they hadn't been for years, not since friendship had been as easy as sharing a sundae and walking next to each other.

And now, there was something between them, a secret that no one else was in on, and maybe it wasn't a deep spiritual connection or anything of the sort, but it was easy and light, without any repercussions.

It came with renewed physical closeness, too, because on his own, Dave knew it was there, but when John was there as well, it was impossible not to want proof that he wasn't imagining it. He always made sure, now, to sit right next to him, or directly opposite. When he sat next to John, he couldn't resist bumping their knees together, and he always, without fail, received a bump back, and he could feel John smiling, he didn't even need to turn his head at all. Dave could see the smile when he sat opposite him, seemingly directed at nothing in particular, and raise his eyebrows a bit in answer, which widened the smile in turn.

Those exchanges made Dave feel important, like an agent on a mission, and only the subtlest hints could be exchanged with his partner in crime-fighting, because no one could catch on.

The hints weren't extremely subtle, though, and people might not have been very perceptive of the way he was walking, but there were sure people that were too perceptive of the way he behaved.

Jade kept trying to tell him about some friendly guy she'd met that weekend, he couldn't even remember the name, but then she stopped herself and smiled wide and unassuming, which made him fear the worst.

“Enough of my weekend! How was Friday night with John?”

For a short moment, Dave actually considered telling her exactly how Friday night had been. One of the first things he'd agreed on with John was to not tell anyone at all, and it hadn't been hard to get him to swear on it. Dave thought it would be perfect that way, he could forget about it in public, only come back to it when the door closed behind his back and there was no chance anyone was trying to read his mind. Now though, with the opportunity presented to him like a free dessert at a pricey restaurant, he found that there was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to spill all the sordid details.

Fireworks and orchestra music and, once again, the naked couple frolicking around in a storm of feathers from the pillows and blankets they'd debauched came to his mind as he tried to form a sentence and he had to shut it down before any damage was done. It was not that he was afraid to tell anyone he'd fucked John. It was only that he'd come across as a lovesick schoolgirl who'd finally got her crush to bang her. And that was not what he was, and even less what he wanted people to assume he was, even if it was Jade, and she wouldn't assume that.

“Oh, y'know”, he said, and waved his hand around a bit, “just the usual, games I refuse to lose at, mediocre food, throwing eggs at the neighbours, fucking around. You didn't miss anything, in fact, you can probably be relieved I took it upon me to be bombarded with tomato sauce and a fuckload of unnecessary dad jokes. Where did those even come from, it was as if he had this invisible notebook that automatically downloads all the worst jokes and transfers them straight to his poor brain, which somehow still has enough capacity for that shit.”

Jade was blinking slowly, her smile had wavered a bit, and she paused for a second before answering as if she had been expecting him to continue.

“Oh”, she said, “that's all? It kind of sounded as if there was more to it yesterday.”

“That's all there is to it.”

“Well, ok.”

Jade might have been a bit disappointed, but she still smiled and patted his arm before turning back to trying to pay attention. Her hand rested on his forearm for just two seconds too long, but it still made Dave feel as if she was telling him _you can tell me anything_.

Things with Rose were different.

Dave could hear in the sound her shoes made on the hall floor as she walked next to him that there was something on her mind she wanted to share with him.

“So”, she began, “there seems to be some tension between you and John.”

Dave had been expecting the topic, but hearing her call their renewed bond _tension_ sat wrong with him. Perhaps it was because the easiness the day brought, the realisation that nothing had changed for the worse, was the farthest from tension Dave had ever felt.

“Tension? Leave that shit in physics where it belongs.”

“I might not be an expert, but I doubt there is such a thing as romantic tension in physics.”

She had the ability to make her smile tangible in the words her lips formed perfected, and the resulting tone of voice was one Dave would have loved to be able to run from, especially now.

He had half a mind to do just that, turn around away from her and walk to their unfortunately shared class room, because he had no idea what to answer to this. Calling it romantic was obviously far from fitting, but she was still closer to the truth than Dave would have liked, and all he could think of to say would only make him seem more suspicious. Why did she have to bring it up?

The moment he spent undecided was just seconds too long, but it gave Rose enough incentive to continue her prodding, and her tone had strayed even more into insufferably smug territory with the next remark.

“Or Unresolved Sexual Tension. Have we gone over that in physics?”

Dave had to fight to keep his mouth from doing more than twitching, or mumbling _unresolved_. He'd been wrong when he'd thought he didn't want Rose to confront him about anything to do with this. He wanted to tell her right now, how she was right, maybe, but so, so wrong, see the understanding in her eyes, that he'd done the unbelievable, and then go on to report everything, in depth.

Dave didn't do any of those things. He had stood his ground with Jade, and neither the satisfaction he expected to come from telling Rose she was wrong nor the desire to flood her with every personal information he'd kept for himself for too long could make him sway. And anyway, she liked not being wrong, and there would not only be satisfaction in telling her the truth, and he suspected in a way that was almost knowing that she had never wanted to listen to him when he still had no qualms about bombarding her with unrelated topics and an overload of details. And if she hadn't wanted to then, why would she now?

 

The next Dad-free Saturday, Dave showed up a little late, but so calm that he almost managed to convince himself he wasn't nervous anymore. He accepted the hug John greeted him with this time, though he disentangled himself a bit too early.

“I made a training plan.”

Dave pulled a small stack of folded papers out of his bag that was kicked somewhere under John's desk, shook it out so that he could see all he'd written on the first page, and cleared his throat in preparation to reading his masterwork.

John snatched it from his hands before he could do that, and instead of any sound associated with awe and wonder, Dave heard a disbelieving snort from John. He looked up from the papers that would have made a booklet had Dave put more effort into keeping them together, and met Dave's eyes.

“Is that a rating system? Did you really invent a rating system for sex?”

“Yeah, if you look further, there's what counts towards the final rating-”

“So how many stars does last Friday get?”

“That was the first time, that's like a test run, and test runs don't get ratings.”

“Aw. I thought it was pretty good.”

“No one said it wasn't, it just doesn't count towards the -”

Something prompted Dave to shut up in the middle of his own sentence, rip the stupid thing out of John's hands and throw it to the side, prompted him to pull John close and kiss him without any preamble. Maybe it was the small pout his lips had formed, maybe it was the memory of every time their thighs had touched under the table and their hands had brushed as they walked next to each other in the last week, maybe it was the thought of all the things Dave hadn't done last time that he really, really wanted to make up for now. It could have just been that the space between them was a lot smaller than a week before, or maybe it was the same space, but it was a lot less daunting to bridge the gap.

John recovered from the surprise of suddenly having Dave's hands fisted in the neck of his shirt and his lips on his own relatively fast. At least for Dave, the few seconds in which he shied back and didn't, at first, respond, didn't count as soon as he felt John push back, and he opened his lips a little and tilted his head more and- this time, there might as well have been fireworks. Dave wouldn't have noticed them.

He was preoccupied with getting in John's pants and keeping their lips connected. There was no hand shoved in his face this time, no words, not even body language telling him to slow down, only a smile pressed against his lips. Dave took it as a sign to speed up and pushed his hand down into John's underwear.

For a moment, he was suspended in a sickening state of vertigo where he wasn't sure if he should really have done it just yet, because John froze instantly. He tentatively moved his hand in a half-hearted attempt to pull back and suggest they just do something else instead, but the movement made John bite down on Dave's lip in what was only partly a lucky accident. It was definitely not accidental when his hands tightened on Dave's hips and he pulled him more towards himself – which would have been nice, had it not trapped Dave's hand in a very uncomfortable position. He let himself be dragged towards the bed, or at least he guessed that's where they were headed because he could hardly see anything.

And then they were tumbling all over each other, suddenly, and even though Dave hit his head and his knees and his shades weren't exactly right on his nose anymore, at least they were on the bed. John was faster than him and plucked the shades from his nose to put them on the nightstand, which gave Dave the time to put his hand back where it had been, this time propped up on his side next to John.

He winced a bit as Dave's hand touched his stomach. Dave halted his movements. He didn't have any idea what he could have done wrong, but John's reaction wasn't hard to misinterpret.

“Your hand is too cold”, he said, eyes blinking open again, and Dave slid that hand all the way into his boxers.

“No, your dick is too hot”, Dave retorted, and he could feel the laugh he got in response, as well as the heat radiating off of all of John, not just the part he was currently touching.

He would gladly have continued moving his left hand up and down, staring at John's jaw, contemplating whether he should just kiss him to not have to pay too much attention to the faces he was making, and feeling John's increasingly heavy breathing ruffle through his hair. One of John's hands had found its way to Dave's hips again and was tightening its grip almost rhythmically, and just when he'd apparently got the idea of at least reciprocating a bit, and the hand was slowly making its way to Dave's zipper, the hand in John's pants cramped and he had to pull back reluctantly.

Considering the small space they had on the bed, it was natural that John's hand couldn't stay where it was or continue its path, which was disappointing to Dave, because he still felt desperate from last time to just be touched, but also relieving, because Dave had no idea how he would have reacted.

The moment was surreal, both panting, disheveled, hard, and in not any mentionable state of undress, and the next step was obvious, but not easy to initiate.

So Dave did what seemed the best way out – he kissed John again and pulled himself closer so that as much of their bodies as possible were touching. It was especially nice this time because he could feel so closely how hard John was, and it had been him, his hand was responsible for it.

The situation at hand couldn't be ignored for too long, however, and when he had to pull back from lack of breathable air, John's hands had somehow found the way to the front of his pants again. It was kind of wriggly and uncomfortable to undress each other lying down. It didn't get much farer than Dave's jeans stuck around his knees and his shirt bunched up under his armpits, and John, pants still half undone, managed to tangle his arms in his own shirt. In an attempt to save the situation somehow, Dave tried to reach something over the side of the bed- he wasn't sure exactly what, maybe the nightstand, maybe he was just trying to stand up. No matter what his intentions had been, it resulted in even more of a tangle as he stumbled over John's legs, and John, in a well-intended but poorly executed attempt to help, pushed them both over the edge.

Dave found himself on the hard floor of John's bedroom, one foot still on the bed, face full of the part of John's shirt that probably hid his face, judging by the giggles he could practically feel tickle his face.

The laughter stuck somewhere in Dave's chest stubbornly refused to come out in any dignified way, and to his horror, a hiccup escaped his throat. It happened a second time, horribly loud and resonating in the quiet room, and as soon as John had finally managed to pull his shirt off, he laughed right in Dave's face.

The mood from before had effectively been killed. In its place there was now a slowly growing understanding that nothing that happened in this room could ever truly be smooth or, god forbid, erotic. And it was probably better that way.

Dave managed to get his clothes off without any further complications (apart from his fucking annoying hiccup, that seemed to reappear at only the worst moments, and every time another ill-timed one escaped him, John started giggling again). John was somehow still wearing pants, but at least he'd thought to take his socks off.

It was like last time in a lot of respects, only maybe that there was a little less nervousness and a bit more anticipation in Dave's veins, and that John wasn't watching him as creepily. He was still watching, not doing anything on his own to put his fingers where they had already been and Dave wasn't about to ask for it – though, perhaps next time. At least he was doing something, undressing, rummaging around in the nightstand, making the usual stupid comments.

Less nervousness and more anticipation didn't only mean good things, as did the fact that Dave had a vague idea of what was about to come. It meant that he was a bit hasty in telling John goddamn, get on with it, which he regretted as soon as John complied with an eyeroll, planted his hands under Dave's armpits and pushed in, because it was hard not to do more than wince.

The feeling was somehow more uncomfortable than last time, but Dave was able to convince himself that it would pass. It was more a blessing than a curse that John didn't feel the need to stop halfway through and make an unneeded joke, but maybe not so much that he didn't have any qualms focusing on Dave's face.

“You look kind of uncomfortable”, he remarked as he settled.

“No shit”, Dave managed to press out between breaths, “that's because you're not moving.”

“Okay”, John said, and did as he'd been told, hesitating a bit at first. He still looked like he didn't believe Dave.

“If you keep doing that with your eyebrows, you'll have a permanent crease on your forehead. The skeptical look doesn't fit you, man, just trust me. Follow your instincts.”

This didn't do a lot to ease the early wrinkle John was sure to develop, in fact, his eyebrows scrunched up further at first, but then, just as Dave was about to take back what he'd said, John's face loosened and he snorted out a laugh.

“Dave, you're so -”

And then, John stopped talking all together and followed his instincts, moving his hips in a way that made it difficult for Dave to not react with more than clenching his jaw, and he didn't want to find out what John thought he was anymore, because all he was thinking was _why didn't he do it like that last time_.

Maybe there was a twinge more pain than the first time, but Dave was also coming to realise that the uncomfortable feeling had just been a very subtle sort of pleasure, more slow rising, which was nice because it meant they'd already come to a point where they could last longer than a minute.

Dave had just begun to feel warm from the inside, and tried to move his hips back in a sort of rhythm when John stopped mid-thrust, eyes wide, fingers curling into the mattress and leaving even deeper dents than before.

“That sound you just made”, he breathed, but didn't elaborate.

“What sound?”

Dave's voice was squeaky and at least two octaves higher than usual, unfortunately, because he was putting most of what was left of his self-control into not making any incriminating sounds. He wasn't complaining about the inevitable huffing from too little air shared by two people, or the occasional low groan, or maybe a few expletives here and there.

Most of what bubbled up in his throat were moans, though, no exaggerated porn moans, but small and soft ones. The trace they left on the inside of his mouth as he swallowed them tasted like being on the verge of crying, like the tightness beneath his ribs that wouldn't disappear no matter how hard he tried to control his breathing.

“What sound are you talking about, I didn't make any sound. Apart from the air leaving my lungs, but you wouldn't have heard that with how loud this fucking bed creaks. How old is that thing, is it from the museum? Exhibition 'now we all know why they were all prudes back then, no wonder if beds had an in-built alarm alerting everyone in the neighbourhood?”

“No, you definitely just made that stupid whiney thing.”

John moved his hips just a fraction. After the moment of stillness, it caught Dave off guard, the feeling still peculiar and new.

“There you go, you just did it again. And it sounds exactly like the cat that sometimes wanders in our garden when I stepped on her tail last summer.”

“Well who are-”

“Or maybe more like when that teacher we had for maybe two weeks tried to use markers on the blackboard.”

“-you to talk-”

“All I want to say is, you should just let it out, dude. I'd just rather you sound like a little girl than a cat that just had its tail stepped on.”

“Creepy much. Didn't think you were into that. Also I don't sound like a little girl.”

John let out a snort and began moving more deliberately again.

“Hello, I was in the same room at the massage place. I'm not even speculating, I know exactly what you sound like.”

Dave didn't know why he was suddenly taking orders, or fulfilling requests. Maybe it was the way the tightness in his chest was lightened just the smallest bit when he tried not to swallow any sounds, even though it was difficult not to. He had never done anything else than swallow down what should have been no problem to let out and pretend as if there had never been anything.

To his own ears, Dave sounded like a steam engine on its death bed, and he couldn't help but blush at the sound, but even though he might have wanted to, he didn't shut his eyes. He'd made the mistake of meeting John's eyes, and recognized that he definitely didn't think Dave sounded like an engine of any kind.

Or if he did, he must have secretly been attracted to motors. Any sign of unnecessary concentration was wiped from his face, there was only an easy, maybe too-wide smile left in a face that was not as red as Dave's, but still flushed. It made Dave smile back a little bit, and the only thing that stopped him from outright grinning was the simple truth that it was goddamn ridiculous to look at the guy whose dick was in his ass and not be able to shake the thought that he was the cutest thing nature had brought forth to this date.

Dave's first thought when John lowered his head was that he had worn himself out and was now slowly fainting, even though slowly fainting sounded like something that might happen in a Rosamunde Pilcher novel, not in real life. Then he pressed his lips to Dave's collarbone, hips still moving slowly but surely. It might have been a reward for trying, or it might have been a ploy to try to get him to open up even more. And it did feel nice, but it wasn't exactly enough to evoke any special reaction.

Until John bit down, which might have been an accident, because neither of them were exactly holding still, but it definitely didn't feel like one. It felt like a short circuit in the cycle that kept all of Dave's reactions in check, and the consequence to his thigh muscles seizing up and his stomach muscles loosening was the sheer impossibility of imprisoning his choked moans any longer.

John laughed against the spot he had just bitten into, and even though it tickled pleasantly, Dave still wanted to hit him for surprising him like this and possibly leaving a hickey, or maybe yank his hair, but then he did it again and Dave had to figure out what to do with the hand he had raised, hitting anything was not on his mind anymore at all, so he placed his hands where they fell, which was right in the middle of the tangle John's hair had become.

He left them there, because for once, Dave actually liked what John's mouth was occupied with.

Five minutes later, Dave was only just coming down from his orgasm high and found John staring at him again, but at least this time he had a question instead of something to throw at him.

“So how much was that on your scale?”

“A two, I guess.”

“Out of five?!”

John sat up straight at this and looked at Dave as if he had lost his marbles, scattered them all over the floor, and turned the light out so that no one would even see their doom coming when they stepped on one. Stepping on a marble was probably comparable to stepping on a lego, in terms of emotional distress. But Dave couldn't have lost his marbles, because he'd never had them.

“Calm your tits, it's on the low end so it can get better, ok?”

John wasn't exactly convinced that the marbles were where they belonged (and they obviously weren't), but he still handed the tissue box over without too much of a fuss.

“Your expectations are way too high, dude. Also could you stop treating this as if you're training me for the sex olympics or something?”

Fortunately, there were still other things John and Dave liked to do together apart from fucking, so passing the rest of the day together wasn't torture. Dave insisted on reading his twenty page masterwork aloud, complete with footnotes he made up on the spot. He paid for it by having his movie choosing privileges revoked for the next two nights.

(He thought it'd be worth it. It was not.)

Dave had to fall asleep back to back with John, their feet almost touching, and it was harder to close his eyes permanently than any time they'd shared a bed before, because long after John's breathing had evened out, thoughts crept into his head. It was only one specific thought, really, and it squeezed itself through the slit under his mind's front door and refused to leave.

The thought was telling Dave to turn around and wind his arms around John's waist and press his nose to his neck, maybe even throw a leg over his, but no matter how often he was on the verge of shifting over, he didn't do it.

Dave fell asleep with his fingers curled in the bedsheets to keep himself from doing something way too impulsive, something that was scary in how it persisted. In the state where thoughts and memories always became a slimey pool of denial and acceptance, it occurred to him that maybe it wouldn't have been so bad, John would probably not have protested, and he would have been warm and soft in his arms, and he'd have smelled nice. Maybe next time he'd do it.

Maybe next time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It sure proved itself impossible to write a chapter in two weeks. I guess I need a month at least.
> 
> At least I wanted to get this out so I don't feel too guilty if I don't write a lot in the next weeks, because I have exams coming up and then the first big con of the year in the middle of March and then it's almost my birthday and then the next semester starts and... the list of what I have to do will never be empty. But I am going to finish this even if it takes me two years.
> 
> And... now idk if anyone would read it but i might write the 'training plan' dave made? i love writing in dave's voice a lot and with the dwindling pesterlogs here i haven't really had the chance to let it show lately... well, maybe.
> 
> also if someone's interested, here's [my tumblr](http://legendarypieceofshitt.tumblr.com/) , because i'm lonely and not above self-promoting


	5. We're Gonna Get It Right Tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We found the secret to the party house  
> And you know we're gomna get it right  
> We’re gonna run until our lungs run out  
> You know we're gonna get it right tonight
> 
> -Introducing The Magic Eye, Math the Band

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, btw, i know when/ in what order their birthdays are supposed to be, this is just for stylistic purposes.

Time passed like fruit flies munching on nectarines, and everything stayed the same.

Apart maybe from the two birthday parties Jade hosted that year, one full of people Dave had never seen and wasn't sure he wanted to see again afterwards, with loud music and alcohol someone had brought, which she wasn't too happy about but not angry enough to tell them to fuck off, and one on her actual birthday, with just the four of them, where she smiled too much and laughed too loud.

Apart maybe from the way Rose was less attentive and more tired every week, and she didn't go out of her way to get Dave to admit something embarassing anymore. He was relieved, but also strangely disappointed that she didn't try to talk about sore subjects, or really any subjects anymore. To get her to actually celebrate her birthday, there had to be an intervention staged by Jade, and even then Rose was not so much an active participant as more a pretty extra with a hollow smile. But there was nothing really to worry about. She'd never been exactly cheerful, and the most logical explanation was lack of sleep, seeing as she was almost always still online when Dave shut off his computer at night.

And apart from maybe the fact that when he was filling out surveys or doing quizzes online to find out what his mermaid name was, Dave didn't check the 'virgin' box anymore, and over his smugness concerning this forgot to ask himself why sexual activity was a factor that influenced mermaid names.

But apart from that, things were the same as always.

Things with John were going well, so far as there were things with John that could be going well. He seemed to be dedicating a lot of his time to learn how to make hickeys, and was thankful for every opportunity to implement his knowledge, but he hadn't really gotten the hang of it yet. Which meant that Dave hadn't had to think up any extraordinary explanations, not that anyone had asked or been suspicious.

Dave didn't plan anything special for his birthday, it was not as if he'd have a lot of people to invite he didn't see all the time anyway, and he definitely didn't feel like making a big deal out of being sixteen. Even so, it was an unspoken rule that John would come over in any case. He always did, even if it was only to bring a shitty joke gift and spend the rest of the evening asking each other _what do you want to do_ while eating cheap frozen pizza.

It was Saturday and there was nothing to do that Dave didn't do any other day, nothing out of the ordinary apart from the nervous ticking of a random clock that reminded him of the afternoon fast approaching, that he'd have a visitor, and no one else in the vicinity. Being left alone completely was the biggest birthday present Dave had gotten for three consecutive years now, completed with a party hat containing a generous tip for the pizza man on his desk.

He'd stayed in bed as long as he'd wanted to, showered as excessively as he never had the patience to anymore, and stared at everything in his room until he was sure he didn't want to do anything. It was a normal birthday.

The doorbell rang at almost precisely four pm, and when he passed a mirror on the way to open it, he considered changing out of his new jeans and the freshly ironed shirt, because with how fluffy his hair still was, he almost felt too fancy. But then the doorbell chimed again, and Dave dismissed the thought. It was stupid. Even more stupid was how his hands were starting to sweat and his heartbeat was speeding up, as if he was picking up a date with very conservative parents in full drag, not as if he was opening the door for his best friend to waste an evening with him.

The first present he received from John was a hug that almost managed to lift him off his feet, complete with a hasty, but still arguably cheery _happy birthday_. The second present was watching him stumble on the way to Dave's room. Dave didn't follow, he was busy convincing himself that he wasn't responsible for most of the stuff littering the floor. When John re-emerged, he had lost his bag, presumably in a strategically disadvantaged point in Dave's room, but was carrying the third present, which was actually wrapped, and had the vague form of a CD case.

It turned out to be a documentary about dinosaurs, judging by the quality rigged from Youtube, judging by the plot a collaboration of an exitable four year old and a sleep-deprived college student. The main character had a name and a dramatic backstory worthy of a high fantasy trilogy, neither sound nor sight were ameliorated by watching on a screen bigger than a regular laptop, and it was the best birthday present since last year's chocolate tool set.

After the last dinosaur adventure had been lived through, Dave felt giddy from laughter that wasn't his own, and it was with a reluctant redundancy that he asked the question after the door to his room had closed behind him.

“So, what do you want to do now?”

John, already sitting on the edge of Dave's bed, scrunched up his eyebrows and tapped his finger to his lips as if he had to think up an eloquent response.

“You.”

Half of Dave wanted to shrivel up at the foreseeable corniness of the answer, but the other half thrived on the self-satisfied grin spreading on John's face. He walked over to his bed and wasn't sure what exactly he'd do when he arrived there, but he'd come up with something. 

He did come up with something, but whatever clever thing his mind had produced, his muscle memory preferred a different method of shutting John up, so he pushed his shoulder as aggressively as he could, climbed on top of him, and kissed him. As soon as Dave noticed the almost-grin pressed to his lips and the arms slowly winding around his back, he realized that he'd done exactly what John had wanted and probably expected of him. But it was too late to pull back, and he didn't really care anyway. It had been a less than smooth way of saying it, but ultimately, it was where Dave had wanted the evening to culminate as well.

Dave resurfaced from makeout land panting and aching to get out of his pants, really, all his clothes, and he tried not to stare down at John too much while rummaging around in his nightstand with the hand that was not currently occupied by trying to open the button on his jeans.

John was apparently too dazed to do anything helpful, grinning at nothing in particular. Dave was frustrated both by that and by the fact that everything he could have wanted to find in his nightstand was stubbornly eluding him. He withdrew his hands from both their tasks and set them on the bed.

Dave did his utmost to take his shades off slowly and steadily set them away, despite how much his hands were shaking. He fixed John with a glare that managed to draw him from the depths of his mind holiday. He cleared his throat just to make his intention obvious, and felt the nervous anticipation he was used to by now settle in his stomach when John's eyes slid over to his.

“I'm horny, and the lube seems to have taken a trip to its sick grandma in sex shop hell, so guess what I'll do?”

“Not have sex with me?”

“There are other kinds of sex, too.”

The look on John's face was still mostly a confused one, even as Dave started undoing John's pants and sliding them down his thighs. He lifted his hips and was all together complacent, but judging by his expression, he might as well have been listening to a lecture on quantum physics after a night with no more than four hours of sleep.

His eyebrows probably furrowed in something like sudden instinctual understanding when Dave unceremoniously pulled his underwear down as well, but Dave couldn't see it, because he wasn't looking at his face.

He was determined.

Up until this point, it had only been a vague idea somewhere in the back of his mind, a funny page ripped out of a comic book that made him almost grin when he came across it while sorting through the looming paper stacks in the back corners of his brain. Sometimes when Dave stuffed it back into the stacks between other ideas of varying importance and urgency, he had to laugh at himself. A harsh laugh, close to frustrated sighing, and in his head, it sounded a bit like saying _why is a person like me, with their personality built on a foundation of the words 'stupid' and 'asshole' even allowed to think and laugh and do things and just even basically exist._

He didn't need to be so dramatic right now, but it was a certain brand of ridiculousness that only his own mind could come up with. Putting someone's dick in your mouth was supposed to be a lot less intimidating than taking a dick up your ass, but then again it was entry level sex, and intimidation wasn't part of Dave Strider's vocabulary.

This was the perfect opportunity, and he triumphantly pulled the unassuming piece of paper out of its stack. The stack was thrown off balance and caused an avalanche, which was probably why Dave couldn't get a clue what to do now.

The obvious solution was to ignore any urge he might have had to check what expression John was wearing now, also strategically keeping his head down so it was less obvious how much he was blushing from the thought of what he was about to do, and just go for it. Which meant in this case to duck down to John's newly-freed crotch and approach the general direction from which his dick was waving at him – saluting him? - god, no – with his mouth. The result was a collision of Dave's lips against the side of John's dick, and before he could try to save the situation and stop the neverending surge of blood to his cheeks by licking his way around, John gave a muffled laugh, and used the hand that was not pressed to his mouth to tug at Dave's hair in a way that very clearly said _stop that, nerd_.

“Stop that, nerd”, John said as soon as their eyes had met once again.

At least he had the decency to be a bit flushed as well and look sheepish as he pulled the lube from under the pillow his head was resting on.

Dave was relieved and disappointed at the same time that he hadn't gotten to show off his blowjob skills. Then he realized that he definitely hadn't put the bottle there, and it hadn't suddenly become sentient and aware of the prison it was trapped in, so it hadn't wandered there on its own.

“What the fuck did you do?”

John managed to sound both nervous and obnoxious when he laughed at the question.

“Well, I definitely didn't put the lube under the pillow when I went in here to get rid off my stuff. And I surely didn't grab it from your bag and pretend it was mine the first time you stayed over.”

A grin spread on John's face like jam on warm toast, as if he was not aware of any mischief he might be responsible for, and what he'd done was just so stupid that Dave wanted to bonk John's head against the wall, bury his own into pillow, and groan because he was in fact irritated.

John was also definitely not aware that inside of his head, two very distinct sides of Dave were fighting against each other. One was more than mildly angry, mostly that this guy, who did the weirdest things in desperate attempts to piss Dave off, had almost gotten his dick sucked, and the other one had unfortunately noticed that that particular grin might as well have been literal jam spread all over John's cheeks, because he wanted to lick it all off.

The angry Dave won, mostly because the other one wouldn't do anything but squish his own cheeks and say awww.

“You little shit, put your fucking pants back on, you're not getting any ass tonight. Unless you count yourself, then you'd have a lifetime supply of ass.”

Dave watched as John pulled his pants back up and laughed again, the setting sun somehow made his eyes sparkle comically, and in an instant, angry Dave had thrown down his sword and brought his hands up to squish his cheeks and join the other him in a chorus of overwrought affectionate sounds. It was absolutely disgusting, but inevitable.

He stopped John from pulling the zipper up and moved to straddle his hips again. He was met with a confused, but not very surprised look.

“Didn't you just- “

“I changed my mind.”

Dave leaned forward and kissed John with all the force gravity could lend him, it was his birthday and he should be getting anything he wanted.

And he did, it wasn't as if John was protesting.

He was grinning too much and laughing at the wrong moments and putting his hands where they had no business being, but he wasn't protesting.

When John shoved him out of bed with a _you take the first shower, birthday boy_ , Dave almost suggested they take a shower together in his slightly dazed state. He still regretted it somewhat as he rinsed himself off, but he'd sobered up a bit. John opened the bathroom door after he'd finished and complained that Dave's shampoo smelled too intense, and Dave groaned into a pillow. It was a stupid thought, and he couldn't explain where it had come from.

After he'd waved John out the door, and down the street, the next day, Dave went back to his room to find a printed picture on his desk. It didn't show anything scandalous, just him and John sleeping, wearing shirts, pressed up against each other with one of John's arms flung over Dave's stomach. There was nothing there to even imply that they'd been naked and panting and much, much closer the night before, maybe the red mark low on Dave's collarbone, but his shirt didn't exactly show it, and he only saw it because he knew it must be there, it still itched him. There was no reason for it, but his cheeks were burning anyway.

There was nothing on the paper apart from that, save for an ugly, hastily scribbled heart on the bottom right corner.

Dave crumpled it up and threw it away without casting it a second glance.

Christmas passed without much difference to the years before, the new year wasn't much more than another midnight Dave spent watching the date change in the corner of his computer screen, and before he'd thought about announcing a ridiculous new year's resolution, he could go outside without closing his jacket, but never without smelling the impending spring in the air.

Jade had started talking about her friend's house again, and she wouldn't relent until a weekend had been found where all four of them were free. It was the middle of March when the date was finally set.

Jade was also the only one to the core enthusiastic about their little trip. Every day in the week preceding that weekend, she had new plans to lay out at lunch, every day at lunch, John nodded and smiled along but wasn't really listening, Rose smiled and answered when she was asked something and Dave just listened and drummed his fingers on the table.

It wasn't that he didn't want to spend time with his friends, they hadn't done that in too long and recently, it was as if he was really only spending time with John, but that weekend had also been a long-planned Dad-free one, and he didn't want to miss it. That's why he was counting on Friday. Maybe it was weird how adamant he was about spending that night at John's before driving off Saturday morning, but he didn't really care. Weird was normal. Weird was how he always was, so, what did it matter if it was a different brand of weirdness.

The really peculiar thing was that no one had seemed to notice yet how obvious everything was. John made no effort at all not to grin every time Dave mentioned that driving on Friday was not an option at all, and it wasn't hard to take it as what it was.

But no one did, so on Friday, Dave was on John's doorstep with his bag packed for the weekend and the hope that conversation could wait until after the tingling in his fingertips had been satisfied.

(A tingling that could only be silenced by touching John for more than a fleeting moment, which Dave had been reluctant to admit to himself at first, but then denying it wasn't of use anymore.)

He didn't have to worry about it, because getting clothes off and other stuff on was almost routine by now, even if they still stumbled and cursed for the wrong reasons, and John laughed too loud and Dave blushed like a virgin.

Dave would never have thought he'd find hairy armpits cute of all things, but here he was, looking at the boy in bed next to him stretching and really, it was impossible for anything _not_ to be cute on him. And anything he said and did and – goddamn, he was doing it again.

Dave forced his eyes up from what he'd come to call John's happy trail, even though it wasn't very pronounced, to his face.

John's eyes were trained on the region of Dave's neck and collarbones, as focused as possible at this hour after this kind of exhausting activity and without his glasses. He was smiling, but it was hard to tell whether it came from sleepiness (his eyes were threatening to drop closed permanently) or pride in what he'd achieved.

Because there was no question as to what that part of Dave looked like right now. He could feel the blood seeping out under his skin, as if there were a dozen of warm water splashes on his neck.

Their eyes met.

“I'm kind of proud of that”, John announced in a voice that would have reflected the pride hadn't it been raspy from definite lack of sleep, “It's never looked that much like a real hickey before. It was always just... whoops, that's a nasty mosquito bite.”

There should have been some better, wittier answer, an answer that sounded less like the unnamed thing Dave felt pressing on his lungs from the inside.

“I've never given you a hickey” was all he got out. 

It was close to a whisper and it was the kind of thing that he wouldn't have allowed himself to say in that breathless tone, as if giving someone a hickey was a rite of passage to the land of happiness.

(Even if that was what it felt like.)

John's eyebrows turned slowly downwards in a frown. It looked as if he wasn't sure what the word _thinking_ meant anymore.

“Why not?”

“I wasn't really ever in the position to do that, especially not today.”

Dave was pulled forward by familiar hands and then his face was pressed perfectly against John's neck.

“Now you're in the position.”

He didn't need more of an invitation.

Dave had, obviously, never given anyone a hickey, but it wasn't as if he needed a degree for it, and he wasn't in a rush. It wasn't sexy at all. It was close and comfortable and he could feel the small content sounds John was making and he thought that he could really fall asleep like this. But Dave forced himself to keep going until he could see the results of his efforts.

By the time Dave had managed to get a red spot of satisfying proportions on his neck, John was fast asleep. His hair was fanned out on the pillow and the strand just hanging down in front of his eyes was moving with every breath. Something about the sight made Dave completely unwilling to move again, so he just pulled the sheets over the two of them and closed his eyes.

Dave's phone vibrated while he was showering the next morning, and he could hear John yelling in the hallway, because he was still not finished packing, and Jade's car was outside the door. It wasn't hard to guess who had messaged him.

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 8:36 --

GG: are you awake yet or do i have to come get you??  
TG: yeah yeah were up  
TG: were coming out in a sec

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 8:45 --

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did it! Took a while, but still.
> 
> If this chapter and the one before that felt like filler chapters, the next ones won't be, I promise. The action is not far behind the horizon. Well, you know, as far as there is “action” in this genre. Whatever this genre is. Romance? I can't believe the first super long story I'm writing is a romance story. Eleven year old me would laugh and point at me to hide the fact that she's too fucking embarrassed to cry.
> 
> (btw, [this](http://irl-davestrider.tumblr.com) is now my tumblr. not that you couldn't have guessed by following the old link, but whatever.)
> 
> i'd like to have the next chapter out by 4/13 but that's when my semester starts and...yeah, idk. i'll try


	6. Youngest Guy with a Hole in his Head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've always wanted to learn how to skateboard,  
> But I'm afraid I'll break my neck  
> I'll be the youngest guy with a hole in his head,  
> Youngest guy with a hole in his head
> 
> -"Hang Out/Hang Ten", Math the Band

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (~*~ is my sign for a pov change. btw, it's not the pov change you're thinking of.)
> 
> also, 50 kudos!! thanks so much, i can't believe over fifty people read this and decided they liked it enough to click that button.

Dave had thought maybe he'd be able to catch up on sleep on the four-hour drive, the way Rose next to him on the backseat was doing, but it was impossible. Not even because the radio was playing pop songs too loudly and Jade and John alternated in telling stupid stories. That would have been understandable.

He couldn't concentrate on anything but the mark on John's neck.

It was turning purple right above the collar of his shirt, and there was no way Jade and Rose hadn't seen. It was a neon blinking sign in a forest of old wooden pointers, and it screamed _I'm sleeping with someone, and guess who it is_ in bright green letters. How had they not noticed it? And if they noticed, why hadn't they said anything? Why did Dave want them to notice so badly?

_“Oh my”, Rose said and pressed her finger to her lips in a mockingly thoughtful gesture, “you must have a very possessive lover, John.”_

_Jade produced a ruler from her back pocket and held it up to John's neck. He shied away instantly, giggling because it tickled, and Jade didn't approve._

_“Hold still! I need to measure that hickey so I can calculate how much they like you.”_

_She leaned in close and scrunched up her eyes, and Rose's gaze slid over to Dave._

_“You can use 'he', Jade, we all know the truth. It's obvious.”_

_Jade slowly let the hand holding the ruler fall to its place, and both she and John turned their eyes to Dave as well._

_“Oh, yeah”, Jade said with a smile, “it really is.”_

_Rose grinned and Jade smiled and John followed their example._

Rose's head was sliding closer to Dave's shoulder by the second, and Jade was giggling along with a story the radio guy was telling, and John regarded the landscape with a smile.

Dave was the only person in the car who took note of the hickey at all, and the scenarios his head came up with weren't the worst thing about it. They were annoying and the place in his mind that produced them was told to shut the fuck up often on a normal day, but there was worse. Like the fact that Dave looked at the mark and wished he could do it again, right now.

He'd been wrong in thinking that indulging in his desperation on Friday would make the weekend bearable. It had done the exact opposite. Instead of cooling the feeling down to the constant hum he was used to by now, Friday night had done nothing but add twice the intensity. It was bad enough that Dave had the vague feeling he'd burn everything he touched, and the only cure was to drag John away by his stupidly low collar as soon as they'd reached their destination. Drag him away to a deserted room and lock the door behind his back, push him down on the bed and beg him to make it stop.

Yeah, it was a really fucking stupid thought. Not that this knowledge helped Dave dismiss it, it just made him want a quicker way to get it over with. Maybe if Jade wanted a break from driving, and the girls left the car for an indefinite amount of time, he could lock the doors and just do it right there, in the car– even more idiotic.

Just as Dave tried not to imagine a place where he'd be alone with John, away from judging eyes, even if they belonged to his other two best friends, Rose's head sank all the way down to his shoulder. It was just the right thing to remind him that the inside of his mind was in fact not the same as the outside world, and he survived the rest of the drive with his arm around his friend's shoulders and his eyes still fixed on John's neck.

They parked in front of a mansion right next to some trees that seemed to belong to a bigger forest. For the last hour or so, Dave had had to entertain Jade on his own, because Rose was slumbering away on his shoulder, and John had taken to snoring subtly into the window. Dave didn't mind being the only one awake to talk to Jade. Conversation was easy and fun with her, the only downside was that he had to pay a lot of attention not to say something suspicious, because his mind was truly not the huge train station it usually was, most of the tracks but one or two had been shut down due to a technical error.

That's why Dave was relieved that he got to shake Rose awake and hear John complain to Jade that she could have woken him up before opening the door he was still leaning on.

Jade's friend Thomas was nice alright, the same could be said about the interior decorating, but Dave really didn't have the mind for appreciating his surroundings or engaging in small talk. No one seemed to notice or care. That was overall a common theme lately, and as he watched John and Rose talk to the host and a few of his friends while Jade smiled on and he himself nodded sometimes, when someone else was doing it, because he wasn't listening, Dave thought that he should have just stayed at home.

He failed to notice that Jade wasn't as engaged in the conversation as she appeared to be, and her eyes had focused on him.

“Dave”, she said in a normal voice that thankfully didn't alert anyone else, “is that a hickey?”

His hand twitched, but he didn't tug at where his collar must have slipped down a tad too much.

“No.”

“Well it looks an awful lot like a hickey!”

“It's not. It's a bruise from where my wall hit me with a tennis ball. She's upset that she can't play as good as me, so she has to resort to dirty tactics to get points.”

Jade's eyebrows were still scrunched up in a way that told a story of how she wasn't completely convinced, but it wasn't a well-kept secret that people weren't exactly falling over themselves to make out with Dave, and she had to be aware of that, too.

“I know it's hard to believe, but my fans haven't succeeded yet in maiming any part of my beautiful visage. Also, it's a bit embarrassing that my wall got that one on me, so I don't go around telling that story.”

Her face softened a bit in an almost-giggle, and for the time being, Dave was relieved with the knowledge that she wouldn't spread a rumour, be it on purpose or not, no matter if she believed him fully or not.

He had to go along with a tour around the house and choosing his room (as if he cared), and sit through a late lunch with a bouncing leg. Rose declared her departure to her newly chosen room to refresh a bit, so that she could actively participate in evening activities, Jade was engaged in conversation again, and John was seemingly picking the air in front of him apart with a scrunched up nose. It was the perfect opportunity, and the unnamed thing Dave couldn't get rid of flared up again.

He walked over to John and tapped him on the shoulder.

John turned around, and from the look in his eyes he was expecting Dave to say something, explain his intentions. The truth was that there wasn't enough space left to scrape together sentences in Dave's mind, at least no sentences that he'd voice aloud in front of other people. He jerked his chin towards the door.

Dave didn't even turn to look if John was following, he heard it in his steps. The door closed behind them.

“Where are we going?”

Dave didn't answer right away. He grabbed John's arm and pulled him a few doors away from the room in which the others were still sitting, and probably hadn't even noticed that two of them had mysteriously vanished.

“Somewhere we can be alone.”

Dave had no way of knowing if the innuendo in his words had been enough to get the message across, but when he loosened his grip on John's arm, he kept step. He was even grinning at Dave, it was so unbearably radiant that he didn't have to turn his head.

“Be alone to do what?”

It was evident in his voice that he had an inkling what Dave had in mind, but still wasn't completely convinced.

But Dave eliminated all doubts when he tightened his grip again and pulled John through the nearest door. It was the room Jade had told them on their tour that she had slept in most often when she visited, because it had a nice view and a fantastic bed, if you didn't mind a bit of creaking when you shifted in your sleep, and a painting on the wall that for once didn't show the ugly face of a creepy old duke. She only wasn't sleeping there this time because she'd wanted to have her room closer to the one Rose had picked out.

It was also the room that Dave had left his bag in, not necessarily because he wanted to sleep there, more because it was one of the bigger rooms, and easy to find.

Dave hardly noticed which room they were in, though. He saw the yellow walls only for a second before he had John pressed against the door. There was no reason for shy gazes dancing around each other and bumping noses and fluttering eyelashes, the vision only formed in Dave's mind when he'd already crushed his mouth against John's, and he banished it somewhere it was well buried under the urge to grab, push, pull.

There was also the urge to get out of his clothes. They were clinging to his limbs in wrong ways, his pants felt like a prison for his legs. Unfortunately, getting his shirt off meant disentangling his mouth from John's for a moment, which gave him the unneeded chance to voice concerns about what they were about to do, and more importantly, _where_. By the time Dave's shirt was discarded, John was still occupied with wiping spit from the his lips, face flushed and eyebrows scrunched together. The way his eyes focused on Dave's told him two things – first, he had flung his shades away together with his shirt, and second, the dreaded argument was well on its way.

He stopped it by wriggling his hands underneath John's shirt and practically forcing him to lift his arms so that he could do away with it. The hands-to-stomach contact earned him a hissed _cold, dude_ , but it was alright. Dave gave him the time to adjust his glasses.

“Are you sure-”, was all John got out in that refractory period. Then his mouth was otherwise occupied again.

Dave could feel John's resolve melt under his hands. The words he had meant to speak, critical and in opposition to what Dave had craved all day, dissolved under Dave's lips.

There hadn't been true opposition in any crevice belonging to John, or at least that's what Dave saw proved in the way his hands had started to wander, and when their lips parted next, he confirmed it.

“Okay”, John mumbled with a smile, “I don't care.”

They stumbled over to the bed, kicking pants and socks off. It wasn't easy to keep physical contact through this, but somehow, Dave managed to keep his hands or lips on some part of John through the process.

He also didn't mind being the first one to fall down on the bed, so long as he could pull John down with him, and he did. This kiss didn't last long.

John pulled away, forcefully.

“Hands and knees, Strider”, John said with the sternest glare he could scrape together at that moment. Which wasn't very stern, because he was still flushed and heaving from making out, a grin forcing through onto his lips, his glasses barely just hanging onto his nose. He looked like a boy who had been given a police uniform for Christmas and was trying it on for the first time, elated but trying to force a personality that was supposed to come with the job.

It was unbearably cute.

It was fucking adorable and Dave wanted John to destroy him, make him forget where up was and down and where his own body ended.

So he took off the last clothing he was wearing and turned around. He found himself staring at the maroon headboard and the yellow pillows and tried not to think about all the times Jade had smushed her nose in this very pillow and probably woken up with her feet up on the headboard, but it was easy to forget about when there was so much else to be thinking about, like how much he didn't want to have to wait another second.

Dave had woken up with a tingling in his bones and no chance to do something about it, and there was no reason to wait. He had a waterfall of words prepared to explain just how much he needed it, but Dave didn't have to spill a single drop of it, because John was feeling much the same, apparently.

Dave couldn't even care about what he was saying or the sounds he was making anymore.

~*~

There were still a few hours until dinner would be ready, and they were big boys, so Jade didn't worry much about where Dave and John had suddenly disappeared to. At first.

But then the conversation with Thomas dwindled- he had to go peel potatoes and he didn't want her to help- and her thoughts could only stray to the three friends she'd come here with, and that two of them had disappeared without saying anything. Jade also thought about Rose, who was always tired and absent-minded lately, which she suspected was only half because of the fear that everyone was drifting apart. But even half meant that an evening spend together with all of them in a relaxing atmosphere would lift her mood a little, and it meant that Jade should probably go fetch the boys before Rose came back from her nap, so they could pretend they'd never went wherever to do whatever, alone.

She'd been happy, at first, that the friendship between John and Dave was apparently rekindled. It felt like it would be a step in the right direction to getting the old Dave back, the one that had actually talked to his friends about important things and done stuff with them apart from sitting together at lunch and sending links to outdated memes on pesterchum.

No such thing had happened. The more time he spent with John, it seemed, the less he spent with Jade and Rose, and from what she'd been able to get out of John and what she'd read between the lines, they weren't even really talking. They just met sometimes and then sat next to each other silently, maybe eating or something. It was weird, and John was strangely secretive about it, but Jade tried her best not to be too suspicious. Teenage boys were a peculiar kind of human being, and she doubted they were selling drugs or planning a murder.

Jade set out to search for her friends, and even if she didn't know what they were up to, she had an idea where they might be.

The door leading to John's room was already halfway open when Jade heard a sound from a few doors down the hall that made her forget what she'd even come here for. It was either someone in extreme pleasure or in extreme pain, and she couldn't recognize the voice.

Intrigued, she made her way over to the other door, noticing which one it was but not really thinking anything of it. If she wasn't supposed to look, the door would be locked, right?

Jade tried the door handle.

It wasn't locked.

She flung the door open with a bit too much vigour and it made a noise as it collided with the wall. Two faces looked back at her, too shocked to show much of a reaction.

Jade took two steps back and tried to breathe evenly, but it was hard when the picture before her eyes had already begun to dug its groove in her eyeballs, one she was sure would never be smooth again. 

“Fuck”, she exclaimed, and she didn't have to scream, because her voice was so strong it carried without much volume, “i fucking _knew_ it was a hickey, you asshole.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;)
> 
> ([follow me if you liked it](http://irl-davestrider.tumblr.com))


	7. You Gotta Hold My Hand, Computer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You gotta hold my hand, computer  
> You gotta be the first in the van
> 
> \- Bigfoot, Math The Band

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was going to write something here but i forgot what i was going to say

Jade was loud enough to alert everyone else in the house, but at least she had the decency to close the door and give Dave and John the opportunity to put something on. While they scrambled for shirts and boxers and really, just anything, not brave enough to look each other in the eye, Jade was complaining through the door.

“That's something I would have liked to know! Not something I ever wanted to see! How could you think it was a good idea to – oh, hey Rose. No, they're not dead. Yet.”

It was difficult to understand what exactly Rose replied, especially while Dave was trying to figure out which way his shirt was going on. He wasn't sure if it even was a shirt he was holding. Her voice was tired, still had volume, but the words only sounded like vaguely annoyed syllables through the door, especially with John steadily going _oh god_ under his breath.

Jade was laughing about something outside. It was not a genuine laugh, it sounded like a chicken someone had accidentally stepped on. Dave reached for his shades but John's hand got there first, and he was forced to look at him.

John's eyes were wide and his cheeks more flushed than he'd probably seen them ever, except for maybe the day he'd laughed so much he had to throw up. But Dave knew that his own shade of red was a lot worse and spread to far more awkward places. He'd rather be naked and curling up into a blanket until no piece of him was visible to the outside world, and he wasn't happy that he was being denied this one little piece of security.

“What are we going to _do_ ”, John asked. The way he was standing in front of Dave, he could just as well have grabbed his shoulders and shaken him, the ghosts of those oh gods still flitting around in his eyes.

“I have no fucking idea, but maybe I'd have a better answer if I had all the vital parts to my outfit back”, Dave said, holding out his hand, and it was obvious what he meant, but John ignored him. Instead of handing the shades over, he made a show out of standing up straight and stretching his lips into a smile. It wasn't an easy smile, and his eyebrows had still not relaxed completely.

“It was probably time we told them anyway”, he said with a voice that was almost not wobbly anymore, “I don't like keeping things from my friends.”

Before his inner eye, Dave saw a magnified bead of sweat roll down John's temple. He didn't have the patience to put up with this shit at the moment, especially not once the door creaked and made clear signs of opening.

Dave managed to snag his shades back from John's loosening grip before it swung open, but that didn't change anything about the rumpled state of his hair and his clothes, the fact that his shirt was on backwards and his pants refused to close all the way. John wasn't better off, maybe worse, even, and the bed didn't look inviting enough for anyone to want to sit on it in the next weeks.

No one needed Lalonde levels of deductive talent to come to the right conclusion about what had been going on.

Jade still wore an apprehensive expression, as if she expected John and Dave to rip their clothes off again and resume what she had stumbled in on any moment now. And she kept glancing at Rose, whose face slowly morphed from tired confusion to perplexed understanding. Jade didn't want the Rose bomb to explode, but her eyebrows also seemed to tell Dave unmistakably _that's your problem to deal with now_.

It didn't feel as triumphant as Dave had thought it would. He had imagined this moment before, not necessarily being walked in on, but the moment when Rose found out he was getting laid. In his thoughts, it had always been something he'd been proud of in his thoughts. Now, he just felt guilty. He didn't feel like the tall marble statue dangling the _I had sex_ sign over everyone's heads. He felt as if he was tiny and waiting to be burned to a crisp by Rose's glare, like an ant under a magnifying glass.

She wasn't saying anything. While Jade voiced her contempt and anger at once, Rose was just staring and judging, and Dave was sure she was conjuring something, and he wouldn't be able to sleep tight until she had let it loose.

The ride back home was awkward and quiet.

Jade had forgotten to turn the radio on, and no one was willing to take the plunge and move more than they absolutely had to.

Rose was reading the book she'd brought for emergencies with apparent high concentration, glancing sideways at John whenever his leg started to bounce a bit too much. He was trying to appear as chipper as on the ride the day before, but his smile was too forced and his fingers too nervous to fool anyone.

Jade was worrying Dave the most right now, though. She held the steering wheel as if she believed it might fly away if she let go, and he wondered whether Jade should be allowed to drive in such a condition – she was a good driver, but she hadn't calmed down as much as she would have liked everyone to think.

Dave himself wasn't sure if riding shotgun had been the best decision on his part – on the one hand, he didn't have to share a bench with John (every interaction between them was twice as awkward now, especially with their friends watching them), and he didn't have to endure sideways glances from Rose.

But on the other hand, he had a first-class ticket to watching Jade's knuckles turn white, and while Rose couldn't meet his eyes directly, sometimes he stumbled upon them in the back mirror, and he could feel her stare on the back of his head. Maybe she'd gained back her ability to read his thoughts, or maybe she was finishing up her plan on how to kill him.

It happened two days later, on Tuesday. On Monday, Rose had pretty much ignored Dave, tried to be civil to Jade, and been curt with John. But, as far as Dave knew, she hadn't asked John to meet her in the library the next day.

Dave found her standing between two shelves, holding an open book, but not reading. She was just staring at the pages, eyebrows drawn together tightly, eyes unfocused, and he wondered whether she might need glasses for reading soon. He hadn't really looked at Rose in some time, there had been no opportunity to, at least not without her noticing and questioning him about it. He looked at her now, while she was unaware, and she looked less put-together than he remembered Rose to be. Her hair was growing too long, even a bit shapeless, there were dark circles under her eyes, and her shirt was more crumpled than immaculate fashion taste allowed.

Dave cleared his throat, and Rose snapped the book shut on instinct. Her expression went from tired to frustrated in the split second it took to shove the novel back into a shelf.

“So”, she began, “you have followed my call and come to finally shed yourself of all the lies you've been telling me, yourself, and everyone else.”

It sounded like a well-rehearsed sentence, and Dave tried his best not to be intimidated.

“Chill”, he croaked out, “i don't see what the big deal is, it's only sex.”

It was obviously not the right thing to say. Instead of chilling, her lips pursed and her eyebrows drew downwards even more.

“What could ever not be a big deal about two of my best friends being in an ongoing sexual relationship?”

“Maybe the fact that it's just sex and really no one else's business. Just a couple of bros having a bit of harmless fun.”

“Strider.”

Rose took a step towards him and she didn't need to point a finger at him to make him feel as if the worst accusation of his life was about to spill from her lips.

“Before you ever have casual sex, humanity will have discovered the secret to eternal youth.”

Dave's mouth opened on instinct, but there was nothing to say, no words he could spin together would soften the truth that reflected from her stoney eyes.

“We both know better than that”, she whispered.

The composure was slowly draining from her. Dave had the impression this thought was the only thing still keeping her standing, and he couldn't stand the look on her face. She wasn't supposed to be so out of it, angry and frustrated at him and probably at everyone and everything else, too, she was supposed to wear that small but confident smile on her lips, walk with her head held high, and giggle secretly at the things he sometimes doodled in the margins of her notebook by accident.

“What did I do”, he wondered aloud, because it must be his fault somehow, he was the only variable in the equation. The only thing that could somehow have strayed from the norm and thrown everything off balance.

“You somehow got the thought stuck in your head that spreading your legs was the solution to all your problems and also not anything worth telling me.”

Her words struck Dave as so visual that he had to flinch at the image of himself with a pose and smile that rivaled those of a porn star. The look on Dave's face was enough to make the rest of Rose's facade crumble off, and she gave a little bitter laugh.

“Sorry”, she got out, probably one of the hardest words she'd ever spoken, “it's not your fault, it's just... it was the last drop to let the flood loose, in the end.”

Dave knew what he had to do, but it was awkward and he wasn't used to it. Still, slowly, he shuffled forwards until he was close enough to wrap his arms around his friend. She sighed and hugged him back with delicate pressure.

“You are still an unrivaled idiot.”

The words were muffled against his shirt and still they sounded much like her normal voice again, so Dave didn't feel so bad anymore when he let her go. Her crooked smile told him that maybe not everything was as good as it had been at the height of their friendship, but she was more out to tease him than to be angry at him now, which he could deal with.

Jade got over her anger from the weekend relatively fast. Dave still felt as if she was a bit more pissed at him than usual, but after a few days, her curiosity outweighed any resentment she might have held.

Though Dave still didn't see the deal with not telling them about it. He did see the deal with Jade walking in on them, and with having sex in the middle of a friends' weekend.

She had accepted the apology that Dave had finally managed to wrench out, managing not to take it like an attack on their friendship the way Rose had. And then she had become curious.

Maybe a bit too curious. Dave came to realize that one of the reasons he hadn't wanted them to know in the first place was that there were just some things he didn't want to discuss with Rose and Jade.

John had apparently apologized as well, or at least Jade was as amicable as ever towards him. Whenever it was just him and Dave, though, but especially when other people were around as well, he was skittish, and definitely not comfortable with as much physical contact as he'd been before. Where before he'd often been the one to take the extra step closer so that they'd be walking close enough to almost be touching, been the one to scoot his chair closer and nudge his knee against Dave's, now he was always the one who took the extra step back.

Dave tried to be satisfied with having unveiled all the secrets he was aware of, that he could speak openly with Jade and Rose without having to be afraid what he might give away. It was more of a relief than he had anticipated. But he didn't get further than trying. He had become so accustomed to the closeness between himself and John, the apparently renewed and strengthened bond, that it was hard to accept it should all be gone just because others were now aware of what had been going on behind closed doors.

Two weeks passed in which John had trouble exchanging more than a too polite, even impersonal greeting in person, and contributed little more than monosyllabic answers to chats Dave tried his best to keep alive. Two weeks, and Dave was slowly coming to accept that maybe this was what it would be like from then on. Jade tried to keep him entertained by asking about the wonders of gay sex, and Rose did much the same, only slightly more covertly. But it did little to quell the nausea surfacing at the realization that John's birthday was coming up and there hadn't been a year since they'd known each other Dave hadn't looked forward to it.

Now though, all the strength left his limbs and he flopped onto the pillows strewn across his bed face first. John's birthday was little more than a week away and he didn't know if he'd even be invited. He hadn't even thought about a ridiculous present. Dave had all but forgotten about it until now, and it felt as if someone had taken the last step on the stairs out from under his feet.

While he was desperately trying to keep the sinking feeling in his stomach at bay, his phone vibrated somewhere near his right ear. Dave wasn't in the mood for another forced cheerful chat, but he reached out to see who was pestering him anyway. He had to wipe a bit of extra wetness from his eyes to be able to see the screen, and it didn't make him feel any better.

The blinking name told him what he hadn't thought possible, and he answered without processing what John's question implied.

–- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 21:35 --

EB: did you realize that we forgot to rate all the time?  
TG: what the hell  
EB: the weird thing you did sometimes where you said a number between one and five after we banged? you haven't done that in a month or so and i was wondering if you'd forgotten.  
TG: no thats not what i meant  
TG: the what was supposed to be interpreted as “why the fuck did you send me that question after refusing to talk to me for weeks”  
EB: i didn't refuse to talk to you! there just wasn't anything interesting to say. geez, stop overreacting.  
EB: it's not as if i suddenly stopped being your friend.  
TG: yeah cause its not as if friendship means you actually talk to each other  
TG: but you just leaned back and let yourself be flooded by wave after wave of babbling like you had gills to breathe through that bullshit  
EB: and it never crossed your mind that i might be nervous?  
TG: nah  
TG: why would you be nervous if youre apparently so sure were still the tightest of bffsies  
EB: because i have other best friends as well, and every time i see your face, i'm reminded of the look on jade's face when she opened that door.  
EB: and then i think of all kinds of unpleasant stuff and then i get nervous and then i can't think of something relevant to say to the stuff you bombard me with!  
EB: it doesn't have anything to do with you.  
TG: sorry to burst your bubble bro but my words have to be the sharp claws to scratch your soap castle out of existence  
TG: that pretty much means it has fucking everything to do with me  
TG: cause yknow you cant even see my face or hear my voice online and it still seems to invoke the same problems  
EB: that's because i can literally see and hear you saying everything you type.  
EB: and you still haven't said anything to the ratings thing! it was a stupid idea, but it was also kind of really funny.  
TG: yeah well you mightve forgot but i sure as hell didnt  
TG: i have like a notebook full of that shit  
TG: every three and two star fuck meticulously documented for the next generations to come  
EB: what would other people even want with that, though.  
TG: dude theres enough material for like three phds in there  
TG: in a hundred years scientists will have bitch fights over who gets to analyse our escapades  
TG: at least ten new theories born from my hardly readable scribbles  
EB: cute.  
TG: what  
EB: well, anyway, i just thought it'd be a nice ending to this thing if i got to read it. a bit like credits at the end of a movie.  
EB: a really weird, wannabe artistic movie.  
TG: but its not finished yet theres still half of the pages left blank  
TG: and yeah its still lots of material but how shitty would it be if we deprive a hopeful student of his masters thesis  
TG: do you wanna be responsible for a wide-eyed idealist losing their faith in humanity because you wanted to stop prematurely  
TG: next thing we know they say fuck all humans invent a new weapon and our beautiful world will be nothing but barren wasteland  
TG: do you wanna be responsible for that egbert  
EB: i don't think i could live with being the one to bring about the end of the world.  
TG: then prevent it  
TG: its easy and free and not the first time youve done it  
EB: ugh, why do you have to be so persistent? maybe i just don't want to!  
TG: yeah ok its not like im gonna force you or anything  
TG: its just i dont really understand what changed  
EB: maybe it's just someone knowing?  
TG: is it because jade said gay sex once too often  
TG: if thats the reason i can kind of get it she was basically laying the words of putin in my mouth  
TG: that someone else shoved under his tongue without his homophobic palate producing anything akin to a consenting sound  
TG: so if jade is constantly inserting bad windows movie maker animation subtitles about cocks under everything you say  
TG: while rose is doing the gangnam style condescendingly in the background  
TG: the way they do to me every fucking minute of my life  
TG: then yeah i can get why youd be turned off  
EB: how can you even dance condescendingly?  
EB: no, don't answer that, rose probably could.  
EB: and they might have asked a few weird questions, but it wasn't that bad! i just can't get that accusing, disappointed stare out of my mind.  
TG: maybe you should just actively do something to get it out of your head  
EB: i'm... not sure that would help, actually.  
EB: i just wanted to read your without question super ridiculous notes to think of something different. and try to be done with everything.  
EB: does that sound like a sensible solution?  
TG: i guess  
TG: i also guess id still be willing to let you read the notebook even though you just keep fucking mocking it  
EB: why don't you just come over on saturday and give it to me?  
TG: that can be arranged  
TG: giving it to you is always my top priority  
TG: will daddy egbert be there  
EB: nope!  
EB: unless you meant your daddy. who is me. ;)  
TG: oh my god no  
TG: never do that again that is so not my kink  
TG: i might just have to burn that precious goddamned notebook while sobbing over all my awful life decisions  
EB: man, it was just a joke.  
EB: see you saturday?  
TG: yeah

–- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 22:17 --

It wasn't exactly what Dave had hoped to come from this conversation, but at least he had talked to John. And there still seemed to be a chance for them to come close to their previous dynamic again.

Dave didn't even let himself think about the possible reasons why he was so unrelenting, why he was looking forward to Saturday with such a grim kind of anticipation. He just closed his eyes, and waited for the next day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long omg...  
> i doubt anyone wants to know details about my life but i'm busy and the next one will probably take about the same time


	8. Internal Organs and Feelings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...are two things I will always be without.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i remembered what i wanted to say at the beginning of last chapter: i suspect i might be the only person on this earth who actually enjoys coding pesterlogs. which is probably also the reason why i keep writing these long-ass chats...
> 
> also: name drop!! proud of myself for doing that in this chapter, because its an important chapter where things happen. well idk if happen is the right word for that but yknow  
> youll know what I mean when you get there

late entry for 10/14/11

no rating but why not a review  
kind of awkward and embarassing but what do you expect of a test drive when you dont even have your drivers license yet  
too many bad jokes and fumbling around but i guess that was to be expected so no complaints  
all together satisfactory experience would fuck again in the hopes of getting better results next time  


10/22/11  
2/5 stars  
this doesnt look to great when you write it down but its a passing grade in my book  
still kinda awkward but the technique is improving id say theres potential  


12/03/11  


this wasnt meant to be a diary or anything but im seriously starting to doubt that its purpose will bring fulfillment to this book so fuck it  
i have nowhere else to write this so whatever  
so jade is all obsessed with asking things like whats it like to have a dick up your butt???? lately and i tell her the truth, obviously i like it or i wouldnt be doing it thats logical right??  
ok i admit i gave her a bit more detail cause i thought maybe she wouldnt want to hear the other answers to the questions she hasnt asked yet that come down to exactly the same thing  
but somehow it didnt deter her at all  
and then today she asked me what it was like to put my dick up someones ass  
i was like idk never done that and it shocked her so much as if i had just told her i was actually her grandma  
and this whole thing just got me thinking because i kind of never thought of it before  
i mean we were banging for how long and its as if i never considered being anything but catcher  
im not complaining i just thought it was really fucking weird and i hope theres nothing too wrong with me  
and i mean maybe i would like to try  
nah you know what he wont be up for it he doesnt even want to fuck the usual way so im not even gonna write it down

There was a lot of bullshit in the notebook, but Dave gave up skimming through all the strange stuff he'd written after less than five minutes. He wouldn't cross or rip out anything in any case, he just didn't care enough.

When he went over on Saturday, his bag was empty save for the notebook, his bus ticket, and an unopened packet of gum. It had been there for years, and was probably still edible, but no one, especially not Dave, had ever acknowledged it.

Standing in front of that door and ringing the doorbell had almost become a ritual in the last six months. He had been getting less sweaty and more jittery, in the good way, with each time. Today, there was neither of those things, no weird heart palpitations, no clammy palms. Dave might as well have felt nothing at all. It was almost as if the numbness from months ago was returning. It was as if the last half year had never happened at all.

And in a way, that was close to the truth. The special friendship with John was apparently irredeemably downgraded, his other friendships were still hovering in the awkward zone, and everything felt too close to the way it had been before it had become slightly better. There was really no use thinking about what had changed, because there was no possible way to unwind the last few weeks, no matter how much he might wish he could. There was also a door opening before him.

Instead of making way for Dave to go inside with by a cheerful greeting, or lifting his arms to all but force Dave into a hug, John just stood in the open door for a short moment that still felt too long. He looked at Dave as if he was calculating the risk of catching a fatal disease from him before finally pulling him in for a halfhearted, awkward hug.

Maybe Dave was the only one who felt the awkwardness, because John didn't seem to notice the tension seeping in behind them after he had closed the door to his room.

„So, the notebook“, John prompted, lounging back on his bed.

Dave was still standing in the middle of the room. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to just hand over the book and disappear again. And if that was the case, he would rather not sit down. He reached into his bag and flung the notebook in John's general direction, but without much vigor. Dave wasn't angry or even resentful, there was just the thought nagging at the back of his mind that nothing was going the way it was supposed to go. Somewhere down the road, he'd taken the wrong turn, and with every step he was getting farther away from where he had wanted to end up, wherever that was.

The notebook collided with John's stomach and fell open on his lap. He opened it with a smile and relaxed eyebrows as if he hadn't just had something thrown at him with unknown intent. For all he knew, Dave might have wanted to harm him, but John didn't seem to care in the least. He flipped to a random page and began reading, eyebrows and mouth twitching in obvious mirth.

The confusion and upset in Dave settled to something more subdued, but no less urgent, and he walked over to the bed to sit beside John and read over his shoulder.

“So that's it, then?”

He'd caught John in the middle of snorting at a sentence about how much it would take to break a bed frame. His face was accordingly stuck between amusement and bewilderment at the sudden, out-of-context question, when he turned around to look at Dave. It was out of context for Dave himself, too, because while he had been thinking something along these lines, it wasn't a question that could stand on its own, and he sure as hell hadn't meant to say it.

“Do you want me to laugh harder at the way you challenge yourself to find ten new euphemisms every sentence?”

It was obvious in the way his eyebrows arched that John did not actually believe that was what Dave meant, that he knew what Dave was getting at, but he wasn't all that ready to acknowledge it upfront. Dave said nothing. John sighed, and when his eyebrows smoothed down again, he had lost his will to pretend.

“When you always say it like that, it sounds as if we never did anything else together than fuck”, John said after a pause, “and that's just kind of sad, dude.”

Dave knew it was the truth. Even in the last months, that was barely half of what they did together. They had ruined countless kitchen appliances, tried to cook and deemed the result inedible, built an intricate mansion on the Sims and been both cruel and nice to the inhabitants, and on one day, they had even done homework. If Dave had written down everything he and John had done in those past few months that didn't involve sex in any way, he would have had to fill more than one measly notebook.

Still, the knowledge that Dave was allowed to touch John in a way no one else was, and that Dave had given the right to be touched and John had accepted, and used that right, it made Dave happy. Only now, when the threat to have that taken away from him wasn't looming on the horizon, but had turned to a fact of his life, was he beginning to realize what that meant.

“You know for a fact that's not the truth, so it's irrelevant what it sounds like when I 'say it like that'.”

Dave used the fingers that had just been occupied with forming air quotes to snatch the book back from John's hands. His eyes widened in something like panic, as if he expected Dave to rip it and swallow the shreds, but he settled back down when Dave cleared his throat and started reading the last line aloud.

It was easy to forget the tension that still hadn't vanished, only crawled back into the corners of the room to emerge at the awkward moment, when John was trying not to laugh too hard at the way Dave's intonation made the written words at least twice as ridiculous. Dave even forgot about the revelation that had been knocking at his mind's door just minutes before. At least until he recognized that one paragraph he'd scribbled down when Jade had constantly been pestering him with invasive questions, and the blood shot up to his ears. He didn't read that paragraph. He made sure to make the reading of the entry before that one as hilarious as possible, so that John was wiping tears of laughter out of his eyes and he could shut the book without anyone noticing that there was still something unread.

There was a minute of relative silence, before John glanced at the clock and suggested heating up something to eat. Heating up something to eat quickly became popcorn, to go with some movie that Dave forgot the name of as soon as John had mentioned it. He followed him downstairs and stood back while John looked for the popcorn.

There weren't really a lot of places it could be, but somehow, John managed to open every cupboard that didn't contain popcorn. Dave really wasn't sure if he could eat anything at the moment. Something was rumbling around in his stomach, almost as if he was about to puke.

“Found it!”

John turned around with the package in hand and such an expression of utter glee at this achievement that Dave almost physically recoiled. He wasn't disgusted, he noted after a second in which he seriously doubted his reactions. He recognized the feeling, but he didn't know where or when he had felt it before.

Dave blinked once and swallowed and the small secret door at the back of his mind opened. It couldn't withstand the pressure anymore.

What he was experiencing wasn't the urge to litter John's neck with bruising kisses and stick a hand down his pants. It was the urge to kiss his cheek and bury his nose in his hair, and it was frightening. It was mostly frightening because it was an overwhelming urge that made his fingers twitch and his eyelids itch, but it wasn't an urge Dave could just give in to. But it was also frightening because he had never realized before, but he knew this feeling so well that it was easy to keep his fingers from reaching out.

It wasn't the first time he'd felt this way at all, and he was coming to realise that every time he had wanted to hold John, press his ear to the pulse point on his neck and breathe him in, he had grabbed his belt instead of his hand.

He was in love with John. It had been that way for a long time, probably, because now that he knew what it was, he couldn't remember a time when he felt any other way.

He had been in love with him the day he let the towel slip, he'd been in love with him when he tried to convince John to sleep with him, had been when he'd succeeded, every time their knees bumped together and Rose looked at them weirdly, every time he tried not to laugh at a stupid joke, every time they kissed, when his hands found a bruise while he was showering and he didn't have to think twice what it was from. He'd been in love with him the last weeks, desperately so, and he was in love with him right now, staring at him across the kitchen.

It was the reason why Dave didn't want to go back to a friendship without benefits, and also why he had still felt as if something was missing. He didn't crave sex, it was closeness that he needed.

John had taken no note of the revelation of epic proportions Dave was having. He might have been wondering why Dave was quiet and unhelpful, but it wasn't worrying enough to turn around from his place staring at the microwave to notice that Dave was staring at him in turn.

The silence was still uncomfortable. Dave felt it if he concentrated hard enough, but he really didn't care. John did care. At least he made every attempt at conversation after he'd fetched the popcorn from the microwave. Dave tried to listen and answer when feasible to pretend he was functioning at least kind of normally. It wasn't working. With every grumble or syllable Dave inserted for a full answer, John grew more frantic and determined to find a good topic for conversation. It even went so far that he talked while the movie was playing.

Dave was still lost in the castle of worries and memories and revelations his mind had created in a matter of minutes, trying to reconcile the past he thought he understood with what he now knew. It didn't leave the capacity to pay attention to every word John was spewing, or the film playing in the background. At least not until that one snippet of a sentence made it through the fog clouding his brain and weaved around until he was sure he must have imagined it.

“What did you say?”

“I said, uh. What did I say? I said 'I don't really care about romance stuff', by which I meant in stories, but also in real life. Even more so in real life, I guess. I mean I used to think-”

Here, Dave involuntarily tuned John out again. He would have loved to listen to him talk about why romance was dumb- if he hadn't been thinking of all the times their hands had brushed while walking outside, and the one time he had actually grabbed John's hand. Dave had done it to keep him from jumping on the street, but he hadn't wanted to let go afterwards, and he had never figured out why.

When the movie ended, Dave wanted nothing more than to go home and be alone. He wanted _almost_ nothing more than that, but he had been told more than once that the things he wanted more were unlikely to happen this night, unlikely to happen ever, so he tried not to even consider them.

John would probably want a proper goodbye, with a hug and everything, and the only way to prevent that was to gather his almost empty bag from and head towards the door.

“You're not staying the night?”

John sounded vaguely disappointed, not to the point that Dave would have imagined him pouting. It was still enough for him to reconsider for a split second. The reconsidering stopped dead in its tracks, turned around and hurried the fuck away when he remembered why he hadn't wanted to stay in the first place. There was no way he would be able to sleep at all squished together in a bed with John, with the way this evening had been progressing, probably with an arm thoughtlessly slung over his waist and a warm breath on his neck once again. And no sleep at all was still less than what he could get at home.

On top of that, he suspected that in an hours time, he would feel the desperate need to talk about what he had just discovered and all the complications that came with it, and the better solution was to escape somewhere where he could chose who he wanted to talk to. Rose was probably the better choice to vomit his feelings on than John in this case.

“Nah, I still have... stuff to tend to, at home. That I can't do here. Bye.”

Dave was out of the door and on the street without so much as a glance back and a lame little wave, but he couldn't find it in himself to regret that. There were too many other things he was feeling, things he wasn't as used to as he was to regret, and they left no place for much else.

Back in his room, he collapsed on his bed and buried his head in a pillow. It was the same pillow he had cried into a few days prior, but right now, he felt more like laughing at his own stupidity. When he raised his head and reached for his phone a while later, he found himself relieved that Rose was online.

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 22:23 --

TG: rose  
TG: i have a problem and i require your assistance  
TG: its urgent  
TG: oh cmon i can see youre online dont leave me hanging  
TG: also dont pretend you dont enjoy being asked for help  
TG: are you going to wait until i beg you  
TT: No, this will do. Please tell me what is more important than my eight hours of sleep.  
TG: what its not even that late and also eight hours of sleep my ass  
TG: i know for a fact youre always up until like two  
TT: The only way you could be that convinced of it is that you yourself are still awake at that time. Which does not make your argument any more compelling.  
TG: i never said it was compelling or i was any better off  
TG: also seriously its fucking saturday theres no reason to sleep  
TG: at least for me theres not maybe for you there is idk  
TT: Before you manage to actually insult me, let’s skip ahead to your urgent problem. I know how you can get and I do actually want to go to bed before two today.  
TG: ok i get it ill get to the point  
TG: so i brought something over to johns today  
TG: and something might have happened that made me realize something that i didnt really know how to deal with so i fled the scene  
TT: That was a step up from your usual nonsense, but still not exactly to the point. However, you don't seem to be typing anything else. Do you want me to draw the conclusion myself?  
TG: apparently you know exactly what the deal is here so why dont you tell me what made me freak the fuck out and run home  
TT: Has it by any means something to do with the surprising revelation about the true nature of the relationship between you and someone we’re both close to? Is it possible that your proclamation “its only sex” does not sound all that true anymore?  
TG: yeah well i have to admit you hit the nail on the head  
TG: or at least youre not as far away from the nail as usual  
TG: most of the time the hammer lands square on your thumb you know  
TG: like you think you hit the nail cause its somewhere there between your fingers  
TG: really you still missed  
TG: and you just keep hitting the same spot over and over thinking youre driving that thing home  
TG: but all youre doing is bruising your thumb  
TG: like damn thats gonna hurt for fucking months  
TT: So after years in denial, and then still denial after we find out you’re not silently pining, but in fact fucking your object of affections, you just suddenly admit you’re in love with John.  
TG: see have you ever heard of oxytocin  
TT: I might have encountered the name somewhere. It’s a hormone, right?  
TG: right  
TG: its the stuff that floods your body after an orgasm  
TG: its meant to make you feel all happy and woozy and shit  
TG: the things also supposed to be why people stay together for more than one or two nights  
TG: it makes you feel more positive towards the person you slept with  
TG: i mean if you werent already feeling positive towards them  
TG: oxytocin just makes the feeling more intense or something  
TG: so basically what im saying is its normal that people fall in love as a consequence of having sex  
TG: especially if its over a long time  
TT: Interesting. But that still does not answer the question why you realized now?  
TT: Also correct me if I’m in the wrong, but you being in love does not strike me as a particularly urgent problem. Or a problem at all, seeing as you implied that by reacting to the hormone, both partners should feel the same.  
TG: i cant exactly tell you why it took that long its probably just that im a fucking idiot  
TG: it was nothing special at all i was just standing there and looking at him and he said something typically stupid and i was like woah fuck what  
TG: i was walking through a thunderstorm the whole time without noticing and somehow always avoided the lightning but today it struck me and i didnt know how to deal with it so i just  
TG: didnt deal at all  
TG: and while i was sitting there soaked in denial of years john is blabbing on about something and i had to hear the one sentence that made me go from confused to fucking terrified  
TG: shit i still feel it  
TG: he said something like  
TG: i dont care about the romance stuff  
TG: i was literally imagining us holding hands at that moment and he goes and says something like that  
TG: see thats the issue with oxytocin  
TG: they can tell us all they want that feelings are nothing but hormones and other stuff cruising around in our bodies  
TG: that love is a chemical reaction and you like people because of their immune system or their smell or whatever other bullshit  
TG: and maybe every emotion can be traced back to something like that  
TG: but how can they be sure that someone falls in love because of a chemical  
TG: when maybe they cant or didnt want to fall in love in the first place?  
TT: This might be a bit out of place, but I have to congratulate you on this monologue, Dave. That is some good shit right there.  
TG: yeah thanks anyway what to you think my mind is still at a standstill or maybe more at a tornado warning  
TT: What did John say before or after that phrase? Without context, it could really mean anything.  
TG: well i wasnt really listening i was kinda preoccupied with other things you get me  
TG: but really idk how it could mean anything different out of context he was definitely talking about real life here  
TT: Well then. Have you considered that maybe he’s just not as much of a romantic as you are, that maybe you two are already living up to his idea of a relationship?  
TG: nah i thought you realized that he was really twitchy around me after that incident with jade  
TG: so were neither completely comfortable around each other nor are we fucking  
TG: that doesnt sound like a relationship to me in any interpretation of the word  
TT: Call me a hopeless optimist, but even after all that, I am swayed to believe that you’re simply trying to find something to make matters complicated because beware everything might be simple for once.  
TG: ok youre kind of right again  
TG: not in the way that he is probably head over heels for me and is just waiting for the right moment or some shit like that more in the way that  
TG: i should probably just say something instead of wallowing because nothing gets solved this way  
TT: Then why don't you? That sounds mature and reasonable, I'm impressed.  
TG: haha youre expecting me to say that i dont want to ruin everything right  
TG: well thats not really it because i feel like everything is already ruined  
TG: i just have no fucking clue what to say without sounding pathetic and so that he might still want to talk to me at least afterwards  
TT: I doubt that there is a lot you could say to John that could be any worse than things you have already said to him without so much as thinking about what the repercussions could be.  
TG: true but still how do i start  
TT: Just say what you want to say.  
TG: ill rehearse on you if thats alright  
TG: k im cracking my knuckles as we speak  
TG: hey john i know this is sudden and strange but i think im in love with you  
TG: scratch the think im sure i just dont want to scare you away or anything  
TG: i think i really just wanted to be closer to you and thats why i was so pushy about the sex stuff  
TG: and i mean it worked for a while and it was fucking awesome like we had this secret we had to protect just you and me and we were having fun together  
TG: im sorry the thing with jade had to happen man no one deserves something like that and it was my goddamned fault  
TG: this is an apology and an explanation and you dont have to do anything if you dont want to  
TG: its not necessary for me to kiss you or fuck you i just want to be your friend the way we were in december without anything to hide so there it is  
TG: rose can you pretend you never read this bullshit im literally cringing why did i write this  
TT: No, that was very good. Heartfelt. Now the only thing you have to do is copy it and send it to John and all will be well.  
TT: As well as things can be in this situation, but maybe they will turn out to be better than you expect them to right now.  
TG: i wont send shit to john right now and you better not either  
TG: im not gonna say anything about this until after his birthday because he deserves a bit of rest from this crap im dumping on him all the time  
TT: And here I was so proud of you for not taking the seemingly easy way out.  
TG: i promise ill say something before april is over just not now alright  
TT: Alright. This is your issue, not mine. Do whatever you want to. At least you figured out yourself what you have to do, so maybe I can trust you to go through with it.  
TG: trust me i will  
TG: night  
TG: and thanks

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 23:44 --

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this pesterlog was one of the first things I wrote when this idea popped into my head over a year ago, and at this time I doubted anyone would ever read it, so im really double proud of myself for getting this far... some points of the story have changed since then so I had to make some tweaks, but its still the same general outline so it counts
> 
> and while everyone's summer seems to be ending, my "summer" is only just starting, so maybe the next chapter won't take quite as long (hopefully)


	9. Comic Relief (and lots of sex appeal)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They want our back stories, dude,  
> It's getting kinda real  
> But who could blame them?  
> We've got comic relief and (lots of sex appeal)
> 
> -Math the Band, Cardboard Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was supposed to be longer and have more happening in it, but it's already a few months later than i wanted it to be, so this is it for now. i can't believe the last chapter was in august??

John had never actually spent a night alone in his house.

There had never been an opportunity and he wasn't sure if he even wanted one. Someone spending the night was just always a lot more fun, and knowing that there was someone else somewhere in the house let John sleep a lot easier. The only repercussion was that when someone spent the night, they couldn't be too loud after ten in the evening- but what did that matter, none of his friends usually liked to scream for no reason in the middle of the night, and he liked staying over at someone else's place more anyway.

When Dad had announced his first weekend business trip, John had thought that would be the first time he'd have to fall asleep all alone in an empty house. He could have invited his friends over. And he thought about doing it for some time, but then he remembered the last time he had proposed a sleepover, enthusiastic and maybe a bit too naive. No one had been as enthusiastic as him about it, and that was nothing new, but usually Jade at least wasn't against the idea, and Rose and Dave were more or less easily convinced. That time, judging by his friends' reactions, he might as well have suggested they give him all their money and he took it as a sign that the time for sleepovers was over.

The childhood days were gone, and all his friends were too caught up in teenage misery to pretend they weren't, so John went along and acted as if he hadn't even noticed. He forgot somewhere along the way, and didn't ask anyone else.

A few days before that weekend, Dave developed his strange obsession with asking John to have sex with him.

Now there had been a few times before that Dave had suddenly taken up an interest in something extremely peculiar, only to discard of it entirely a few days or weeks later, so John wasn't too concerned at first. John tossed the thought to say yes only to mess with him without thinking about it twice, mostly because it was impossible to him that Dave could be serious about this.

So when he went to bed that night, sleep didn't come less easy than any other night, because he wasn't thinking about Dave, and what Dave might be thinking about in turn in that moment, because Dave wasn't serious. And if the notion that this time, Dave might in fact be serious had settled somewhere in the back of his mind, he didn't let it become any more than that. There had been times when he had taken people too seriously, when they had very clearly been joking, and he didn't want to deal with the embarrassment that something like this brought again, even if other people would never have guessed he was embarrassed.

It took a while, but with how persistent, downright needy Dave was, it became hard to deny that he was in fact serious. He wasn't joking, and John would have to come to a decision as well, after the days he had spent denying what had been obvious.

His first instinct was to say no and forget Dave had ever asked, shove it somewhere in the back of his mind and lock the door on it. But maybe saying yes wouldn't be that bad. Sure, it was weird thinking about having sex with Dave – because sex was this big, faraway thing that grownups did and yet everyone was talking about, and because it was Dave. It wasn't even because Dave was a boy. In some way, John didn't think of Dave as a boy at all. He was a friend, and as such he had the privilege not to be marked down on an imaginary scoreboard in blue or pink. He was just Dave. And that was scary enough.

John couldn't remember how he got home that day. He was so occupied with that topic that his body took the required steps, and he only woke up from his trance when he'd already thrown himself headfirst onto his bed. There wasn't anything special about his bed. It was a bed, it was a part of his room like his desk and the chair and everything else in it, and he'd thrown his head on this pillow more times than he could remember.

He had also slept in this bed most of the nights in his life, and among the many eventless and soon forgotten nights, some stood out, most of all the ones in which he hadn't been alone. All of his friends had slept in this bed, even though he had never shared it with Rose, and had failed to find sleep when Jade was lying next to him, because she never knew when to stop being funny, even when she was asleep.

Dave had slept over the most, and falling asleep was easiest with him, maybe just because of that fact. He was not an easy sleeper, but there was something about John's bed that made him peaceful and sleepy if he let himself. The sound his hair made on the pillow case when he moved his head and the barely understandable phrases his mouth spewed in half-sleep were nice to fall asleep to. John never slept as well as when Dave was beside him. He made just enough noise to assure John he was still there, but not enough to disturb him, and when he looked over, he saw a tranquil face he didn't often have the chance to study.

He hadn't fallen asleep next to Dave in over a year, and John was beginning to think that it might not happen ever again. Dave had apparently forgotten he had ever had a friend close enough that they confused their pajamas and woke up with their legs tangled together.

And even if he hadn't remembered, now he wanted something close to that. Sleeping with each other was not the same as sleeping next to each other, but maybe it was something like the grown-up equivalent. It would never be the way it had been in their childhood again, but maybe a step forward could be a step back into childish happiness. John lifted his head from the pillow and stared at the wall behind his bed. He should say yes.

He had pushed past the initial hesitation, and saw no substantial reason for saying no. It wasn't as if John was believed you should have only have sex with someone you're in love with, or even someone you're married to. He was a 15 year old boy, and no one had bothered to tell him those things were obligatory. And even if somewhere in the back of his mind, he was clinging onto the idea that you should have your first time with someone special, Dave _was_ someone special. Not in the way he was supposed to be, but it was good enough. And no one would find out, so it didn't matter.

John wandered over to his computer. He would tell Dave _okay_. There was nothing he had to worry about, Dave had said so himself, right? People put dicks in butts all the time, and they had done a lot more ridiculous things together.

He didn't hesitate more than a handful of seconds before he clicked on the icon and sent the message. Dave responded immediately, as if he had been waiting for exactly this to happen the whole day. Even through the mock surprise and misunderstanding, it was easy to read Dave's words as relieved, almost elated, and this was the point at which John shoved all doubts away. If it made Dave happy, it couldn't have been the wrong decision.

He did not come to regret the decision in the next days. There was nothing John could have put his finger on that made him feel this way, but everything was more colourful. People smiled more, and the air smelled like home wherever he went.

The week went by as fast as only the weekends usually did, and on Friday, John waved his father goodbye with the knowledge that he would not be alone this night, which made it more easy to smile, but also twirled knots in his intestines.

They loosened when Dave turned up on the doorstep. The weirdly tight feeling in his stomach might have disappeared if Dave had just let John hug him right away, but seeing his face, carefully not twisted up in nervousness, was relieving in itself. And when Dave's arms did finally find their way around his middle, there was hardly any trace of knots in his stomach left. There wasn't anything to be worried about.

Acting stupid around Dave, with Dave, and making him laugh, had always been easy, no second thoughts, only actions and warm pleasant tingles. Kissing him was much the same. It was obvious that Dave didn't have a lot of experience, but it wasn't like John had kissed a thousand girls at various parties. There had been two at the same party, the first had come up in the round of spin the bottle he had somehow been convinced to play, and the second one had come right after, shoving her tongue down his throat because she wanted to show him how to do better. It felt better to kiss Dave, if only because John actually liked him, and had known him for years instead of only for a few hours.

When they went up to John's room, it was enough of a sign that his stomach threatened to coil in on itself again. But Dave was still more twitchy without twitching at all, and it was funny to see, so John put a hand on his butt, in the dark, where he still had the moment of surprise on his side. Dave might as well have shrieked and started screaming about mice for how hilarious his reaction was. His face was flushed when he stalked over to John.

It didn't lose in redness over the course of the evening, but that was not a bad thing. There wasn't anything bad. There was only lots of awkward. Like the time that John couldn't look at what he was doing, because he was feeling it enough. He couldn't even be sure that Dave's face was red anymore, because his eyes were steadily focused on a point way above Dave's head, at least as focused as they could be without his glasses.

And the way he was with awkwardness, it resulted in a barrage of jokes that he was glad he could forget easily, because he didn't want to think about what Dave thought of them.

At least this phase only lasted a short while, because as soon as it was over, there was nothing unusual about the situation anymore. Yes, he was naked in bed with his best friend with whom he had just lost his virginity, he was wearing his socks where he would usually be wearing boxers at the least, and he was a bit more elated than he would have been about something like this two weeks ago, but he was laughing, and Dave was mock-angry and attacking him with ridiculous word vomit, and it was good that way. It didn't matter what had just happened, because everything was the same as before, if not a little better.

That he had just had sex, and that it would happen again by design, was nothing more than a happy footnote in John's mind when he went to sleep that night.

In school next week, he felt like a secret agent on a mission. There was no way he could keep acting as detached with Dave as he had before, and while there had been times when he could hardly spend five minutes away from him, now touching his shoulder or tapping his thigh was like exchanging subtle hints with his partner in crime-fighting, because no one could catch on. It was easy and light, and just for that, John felt like the nervousness had been worth it. It felt like having a best friend again after doubting that fact for way too long. There was a secret that was theirs to keep, no one else was in on it. It was easier than he would have thought to keep it that way.

The more Dad was away and Dave came over, the more routine settled in, slowly replacing most of the initial awkwardness. There was still fumbling and tripping, it was never picture perfect, but it was perfect in a way that eluded any eloquent descriptions. It felt nice and warm and close, and that was all it had to do.

Dave had started the whole affair with a purpose to it, but John had never believed that it would carry through at all. It was a disguise, used to hide something much less depraved than i'll teach you how to have sex, because neither of them had the authority to teach something like that. He just forgot about this part of the deal and carried on until sleeping with Dave was normal, but nonetheless exciting.

It was also an incentive to learn things about Dave he had never bothered to pay attention to. Like how high and breathy his voice could get and how far his neck could stretch, how bright his eyes were and how soft his hair. It was also sweaty sometimes and fell in his face too much, but it fit him with flushed cheeks and glazed-over eyes. He also looked really good with bruises on his collarbones, from a purely aesthetic point of view.

Dave was also a funny guy, if you learned to appreciate his humour. John had always appreciated this special brand of humour, because some of the stuff that left Dave's mouth on a daily basis was too ridiculous not to laugh at. But there was a difference between laughing at something because it seemed funny, because the words tumbled over each other like drunken dominoes and made sense only in a very convoluted way, and appreciating the whole thing, sentence structure and word choice and meaning and all.

John's intentions had never been malicious, but in hindsight he might have been too angry at Dave for things that just came with being friends with him. He didn't like to go outside much lately, but that didn't mean that he didn't want to spend time with his friends anymore, it just meant that he felt better when he knew where he was and how everything worked. And maybe sometimes he needed a bit of a push in the right direction, a hand held out to him to help him out of whatever rut he had fallen and gotten his butt stuck in. John had done it before, he knew he had, but with the years helping Dave in all these subtle ways had begun to feel more like a chore than anything else. Spending more time with him, in whatever way, made John want to try those things again, and he did. It felt a lot more clumsy than it had ever before, but that was because he was rusty, and he would learn how to do it again in a few months.

It was unbelievable that no one noticed anything.

Rose was caught up in whatever had her staying up late, and Jade didn't seem to realise something was going on, either. John was sure the two of them had been more perceptive at one point, but maybe he was mistaken.

Dad didn't say anything, but that wasn't a surprise. He didn't see John and his friends at school and would not know of any different behaviour. He was also not the type of father to go snooping around his son's room just for fun, because he trusted John, and John made sure that any incriminating items were disposed of in a way that would not make Dad suspicious.

And if John was in a better mood and joked as much as he had two years ago, that didn't have to mean anything. Teenagers were known for mood swings.

After a while, John got too sloppy. He didn't bother walking the two blocks to the next dumpster to drop off the used condoms, he just put them in the house trash. Not in a really obvious way, he usually pushed them under a few other things, and trusted that no one would look through the trash. It worked for a while, but then there came the day where Dad had apparently indeed looked through the trash.

“Son, you know you can tell me anything.”

The phrase was innocuous enough that John didn't, at first, suspect something out of the ordinary. He was probably talking about school, maybe John hadn't talked about his homework enough lately.

“Of course I do, Dad”, he said, and could hardly stop himself from rolling his eyes.

Dad cleared his throat and a strange expression crossed his face, one that John hadn't seen there before. He had no idea what it meant, but the first inklings of unease started to rise in him.

“I am glad to know you are engaging in safe sex, but I wish you would have introduced me to your girlfriend.”

John was glad he wasn't eating or drinking in that moment, because he would have choked on it. The way it was, he opened his mouth to say something in return, explain that there was no one to introduce because there was no one new, but also that there wasn't a girlfriend, or even anything of the sort.

“Or a boyfriend.”

Dad was wringing his hands almost nervously, and he was never really nervous. John had to say something.

“Uh”, he started. Dad looked at him.

“There's no girlfriend”, John got out.

“But the condoms - “

“Yeah, I'm, um, sleeping with someone but there's no relationship thing.”

Dad's hands fell flat on the counter. He had probably been imagining a wedding and grandchildren already.

“So no introductions?”

“Nope.”

John got out of there as soon as he could. Neither his father's disappointed sigh nor the thought that he had admitted to doing something really weird were easy to stand.

And it was something weird he was doing, wasn't it?

He was a teenager, young enough to do stupid and unexpected things without causing too much of a surprise. But he was still having sex with his best friend, and that wasn't unheard of, young people were supposed to experiment with that stuff, right? His best friend was still not a pretty girl he would later realise he was actually in love with, marry, and have kids with. John's best friend was a guy, and he wasn't supposed to be attracted to him, not even to the extent that he should have considered saying yes.

But he had agreed, and it was only now catching up to John what it meant that he couldn't regard Dave as a boy. It was difficult to see him as anything else than that, Dave and nothing else. He couldn't say what other people saw or thought when they looked at Dave. Did they guess his correct age? Did they see him as someone who would follow and obey, or a rulebreaker? Did they think he was handsome?

It was hard to say, because when John looked at Dave, all he saw was just Dave. He couldn't look at him objectively, all he saw was what kind of person he knew Dave was, all his downfalls and his talents, the glory moments and the quiet ones, and it was more than looking at a beautiful face. Everything Dave did was interesting, even if it was normal and boring, and so it was nice that John had taken this opportunity to find out all these new things about him. 

Like the way he kissed, always startled that someone would actually press their lips to his. Almost unresponsive at first, how his eyebrows rose in a disbelieving arch tangible in the twitch of his lips, then eager to return every little motion, pressing and nibbling and opening his mouth as if this one kiss was a stage and his lips were a microphone and he would never get the chance to speak his mind again.

There were a few uneasy insects crawling around in the pit of John's stomach, yes, but ultimately he couldn't bring himself to actually regret saying yes. The pros far outweighed the cons.

Even though he was happy that he got to spend more time with Dave and lighten his mood, he had other friends, too. Rose and Jade had never been second best, just a slightly different kind of friend, somehow, and John wanted them to be happy, too. The way they had only been when they had all been kids, when Dave had still clung onto his shirt when they shared the bed, and pretended not to be embarrassed about it in the morning. Lately, John was beginning to feel that perhaps those times had been little more than a pleasant dream. Maybe they had always been awkward and unhappy children.

So when Jade invited them for a weekend out, in John's mind it built up into the perfect opportunity to lift everyone's spirits. He was so occupied with being elated about spending a weekend with his friends that at first, he didn't notice how strange Dave was acting. It wasn't unusual for Dave to get more quiet the more people there were in his immediate vicinity, but that didn't extend to Jade and Rose, because he was at least as comfortable around them as he was around John.

Around the middle of the ride was when it occurred to John that Dave was being awfully quiet, and was also, judging by what the rear view mirror showed him, staring off into an unknown distance. He hadn't been that way in the morning, and he had definitely not been quiet last night, so there was no clue for John what had gotten into him.

Only with his back to an old door and Dave encroaching on his personal space with his goal obvious in the arch of his eyebrows and the way he moved did he come to the conclusion that maybe Dave had been missing him. That sounded nonsensical at first, he had been there all the time and Dave had been right next to him. But lately, it felt as if they were leading two different relationships, best friends in public and something that was closer to lovers than anything else in private. Dave could hide it pretty well in daily life, but somewhere in the back of his mind, John had always been aware that Dave had a peculiar relationship towards the second part. He didn't want to see it as what it was, but with every week Dave craved it more and couldn't part his hands from John as soon as they were alone.

This was what all that had come to.

It was his downfall, in the end, that the way Dave kissed cancelled out the doubts that came with where they were and what they were about to do and how cold Dave's hands were. None of those things mattered, because Dave's lips convinced him that what was important was following what he knew he wanted to do, and that was easy.

Staring back at Jade's horrified face was not easy.

John had gotten so used to no one knowing about this thing with Dave that he had wasted no thoughts at how anyone would react. They hadn't found out the first few months, why would they find out now? But they had, and watching Dave dress with that uneasy expression, guarded as he had not been in months around John, did not help the nervousness.

He was still nervous even the next day, but it didn't show as much, and perhaps John had forgotten himself that he wasn't acting like he usually did. Rose and Jade were looking at him weirdly, throwing him sideways glances, like a teacher who noticed you misbehaving during class but wouldn't say anything about it until after the bell had rung.

John did not want it to be this way. Why could he not have both – Rose and Jade in a good mood, them and Dave close to him, and all of it without having to bend the truth or hide anything? Whatever the answer to that question might have been, it didn't seem as if it were possible.

There was only one thing out of the ordinary, one fact of his life that could have been responsible for this whole mess – that _was_ responsible. He couldn't do those things with Dave anymore. He couldn't sleep with his best friend and expect his life to be normal and every relationship to be healthy. That was the resolve he took in the car on the way home, while everyone was still shocked.

That resolve hadn't originally involved being more distant to Dave, but it came without having to be part of it. Dave didn't seem to get it any other way. Part one of the things he wanted to achieve – still be close to Dave without having to be weird around Rose or Jade – didn't seem like it could be a success at this point. There was still hope for his relationships with the girls, though.

Jade still had problems looking John straight in the eyes the next week, she probably felt the same way he did. Ashamed, somehow, and transported back in time to that moment every time she saw his face. So it was Rose that talked to him first. She had been tense and less put-together than ever before in the last days, but when she came to him, at least a part of the weight on her shoulders seemed to have been lifted.

“I talked to Dave”, were the first words out of her mouth, and they sounded like an admission and also something she desperately needed to get off her mind. It was mostly an explanation to John for why she looked relieved.

He wondered what exactly they had talked about and what Dave had said, but there was no opportunity for him to ask, because she knew exactly what to say and there was no one to come between her and the words she was meant to say.

“And I'm well aware that there's not much of a chance you'll be more sensible than he was, but I need to ask anyway, do you fully believe that what you two have is a purely sexual relationship?”

“Yeah”, came the automatic answer, because John was well aware what Rose was getting at with this one, he thought at least. But then she let out this deep sigh, the prelude to an even worse speech, and he re-thought in a matter of seconds.

“I mean, no, not really? It's not as if all we do all day long is bang, we're still good friends. Maybe even better friends than before?”

There was a crease on Rose's forehead, and that could not mean anything good. And if there was one thing John desperately wanted to avoid, it was Rose getting the opportunity to voice what she had to say about that observation John had made. He decided to just wrap up the conversation quickly. He liked Rose, and he would have gladly talked to her for longer, about anything but this topic.

“Look, this is what it was for me, okay? We were friends, and then we fucked, and we are still friends now, and that's it. It's over, it can all go back to the way it was now.”

Rose acquiesced almost immediately, quicker than he had expected, but he heard her mumble about tents. She did not bring the topic up again, at least not while face to face. It sometimes shone through in easy chats about nothing in particular, but the wording was so ambiguous that John ignored it. Had she wanted to talk about it, she would have had to make an effort.

Luckily, Jade was, even though more persistent, not intent on asking the kind of questions Rose would probably have loved to still be asking. She asked things that were uncomfortable, but still easy to laugh about.

Dave still behaved the weirdest out of everyone. He practically clung to John whenever he could in any way that was not literally bodily clinging to him. It was uncomfortable and useless, and yet when John tried to make him stop, Dave acted as if he was not the one who was weird. How was he not feeling this strange twinge, how was he not noticing that people were looking at them – were they? Had Dave maybe been this way all the time, and John had just not been in the state of mind to notice that he might be a bit too close for comfort?

John thought about it often, but rarely actually talked to Dave anymore. Rose and Jade were a different topic, it was easier with them. And one day, two weeks before his birthday, he realised that his last actual conversation with Dave had been days ago. John couldn't even remember what they'd talked about. So he asked him the first question that came to his mind, which was about how all of their escapades had started – with a training plan. They had forgotten about it after not too long, and in the short seconds before John hit send, he regretted not doing rates more often. It had been a funny idea. It had also been easy to forget how nice and effortless talking to Dave could be, without thinking too much, which was usually what John regarded as one of his specialties.

The day that Dave passed over the notebook was supposed to be the end of something and the start of something else- the official end of their old relationship, and the start of a new, better friendship. It was a day like all the weekends they had spend together in the last months, only without the happy ending. And at first, everything seemed to be going well. The notebook was a handy thing for overcoming awkward stages in friendships. Dave had documented almost everything in this careless, almost crude way that was at the same time too detailed and orderly, and to worry about a series of event that could be put on paper like this was ridiculous. After Dave had finished reading and John had finished laughing, he felt like everything was cleansed of the tension that had grown in the last weeks. It was fine. He could have fun with Dave again.

There was no reason at all why Dave should have grown quiet again, he wasn't quiet. If there was ever a prolonged amount of time where Dave didn't make any sort of noise without a regular excuse like that he was sleeping, something had to be wrong. John didn't notice right away, he was too caught up in being happy that everything was back to how it had been before to notice that Dave was not. And when he finally did notice, it was too late, because all he could do was try to coax Dave into a conversation, and fail. He said a lot of stupid things, unnecessary things, but that wasn't anything unusual. It was just a daily occurrence, so that didn't register to be a valid reason for Dave to behave this weirdly in John's mind.

Then he was out of the door, and John would have liked to believe he was telling the truth – that he had something to do at home- but it was Saturday, and that Dave should have something so urgent to do on a Saturday that he couldn't have done on a Sunday seemed improbable. What was the other possible explanation? That Dave didn't actually want to spend time with him? But he had been the one who was adamant about hanging out. Or maybe he hadn't been. For a while now, Dave hadn't actually suggested just hanging out without the definite implication of doing more than just hanging out, so maybe that was the reason. Maybe he had realized that John without sex, just plain old John as a friend, was too boring for him.

He tried, but he couldn't shake the thought. John tried to tell himself Dave wasn't like that, they had been friends for years, and even if outsiders maybe thought they had nothing in common, he knew that it was not the case. And even if it was, they still had fun together, right? He'd said that to Dave this very day, even if Dave had not looked elated about that fact. Maybe Dave was giving up on him after all.

That was what he went to bed with. Instead of a best friend sleeping next to him, breathing deeply and letting him know nonverbally that everything was going to be alright, he had the nagging thought that everything was not going to be alright, and it was not an adequate substitute for Dave. John's first night completely alone in his house didn't come with a sense of elation and more responsibility. It came with dread and insomnia, and a lot of unwanted ideas. For example what would have happened if he hadn't refused to continue having sex with Dave. He didn't hate sleeping with Dave, it had always been just another way to bond, and fun, and maybe he could have shaken the feeling that something was ultimately wrong about the situation if he had just tried to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i know i said this would be out before the end of the year, but life happened i guess. actually, even if no one cares, i still need to tell everyone: i would never have believed in, but i was object of an even more awkward confession than the one that is... still not in this chapter.
> 
> so i'm no longer single!! i just hope my girlfriend never reads this far haha
> 
> idk how long i'll take for the next chapters because i'm stressed with lots of other things on top of that, but this is my testament that i am never giving up on this.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so. This is it. I’m sorry, but if I’m being honest, I’d rather go back on my promises than force myself to finish this story and have it be very shitty. The truth is, I don’t really want to write this at all anymore. Reason one is that I’m not really into homestuck anymore (something I never thought would happen?? But here I am). Reason two is that the whole premise of this story seems super fucked up to me now, and I don’t exactly want to write a story anymore that is about young teenagers fucking. Reason three is that I have so many other ideas for other fandoms, but I can’t bring myself to write them if I still have this unfinished on my plate. So here it is: the part I had already written, with notes for what would have happened, but what isn't written.
> 
> (I might still finish my other homestuck story, if! I ever find my outline for that one again. Lmao. Cause I can’t fucking find it.)

Dave was weird.

It was an universal truth, yes, but in the two weeks following that weekend, he was especially weird. Weird to John, mostly, which was either because he behaved normally to everyone else, or because John didn't pay enough attention to his interactions with other people. Maybe it was less that Dave was weirder, and more that people were weird to John, because Rose threw him more looks than she usually did.

He'd hoped that everything would soon go back to normal, and sometimes it seemed it was right around the corner, the final piece that would fall into place and make everything perfect. But only sometimes. Other times it just felt as if John was clinging onto something he had never seen before, or reaching for something he could not be sure would be there, it just felt- weird.

But time passes, whether you want it to or not, and in this case, time passing was a blessing, because it meant that John's birthday was fast approaching, and with it the day that all of his friends would be united under a roof that didn't belong to the school, and spend the night there. Maybe everyone was weird because they were planning a big surprise for his birthday.

But the day came and the only other thing special about it other than being a birthday was that it was also Friday the 13th. The date was the most used joke that day, but it never bothered John, because the party, despite everything that might have made it awkward, turned out to be awesome.

 

(The birthday party happens. Rose, Dave and Jade are all there and also spend the night. The next bit happens when they're all about to go to bed, and John and Jade leave John's room for a short while.)

 

He hadn't thought about what Rose and Dave would be doing while they were out of the room, but what he saw when they got back was not what he would have imagined if he had thought about it.

A girl and a boy in this kind of close embrace, arms around each other, legs entwined, faces close enough to share breaths, was surely supposed to look and feel like romance. But Dave and Rose didn't look like they had been making out or planning on it, they looked like they had been talking, sharing secrets, comforting each other and in each other, something a lot more intimate and a lot more platonic than what their pose seemed to suggest. They looked like a pair of twins that had never been separated.

Jade made a drawn-out aww sound behind him, and it explained why John's mouth twitched into a (fond) smile and his chest felt warm, heavy and light at the same time, but it did not explain why his eyes were stinging with tears at the same time.

Jade said something- he didn't hear every word, but at least part of it sounded like cute. John was already on his way to the bed, to rid Dave of the shades he had stupidly fallen asleep with once again. Only he hadn't. He wasn't wearing the shades, they sat comfortably on the nightstand, but John only realised when his fingers were almost touching the bare bridge of his nose. Jade watched him, hands full of the blanket she had grabbed, as if waiting for him to do something stupid. So he ruffled through Dave's hair with his left hand and patted the back of Rose's head with his right hand.

Rose had a tiny crease between her eyebrows even in sleep, and though her breaths were even and deep, her arms were still rigid, almost clenched around Dave, who slept with his limbs flopped and his mouth open. Jade cleared her throat, and John jumped to help her tuck their friends in and make a camp for themselves on the floor.

Jade didn't try to initiate a deep conversation, but she did hold her arms open, and for a while, it was nice to hold her. She was warm and soft and smelled like nothing in particular, just friendly, but she was not as easy to hold as Dave. Jade was uneasy and restless in half-slumber, too heavy on his arms, so John turned around after ten minutes, and just let her breathing on his neck and the twitching of her fingertips somewhere behind his back comfort him.

When John woke up the next morning, the makeshift bed next to his was empty, but still warm and ruffled from the girl that had just recently left her place there. A single hand was dangling from his bed. He yawned and got up to go to the bathroom or look for the girls- whichever happened to come first. John found Rose and Jade whispering just outside his bedroom, and they stopped and looked at him. Jade's eyes were especially wide, but he didn't think much of it- who knew what secrets they had that he wasn't supposed to know about? It could have been anything.

By the time everyone filtered back inside of John's room, Dave was fully awake, or at least awake enough to sit up, put on his shades, and scroll through his phone. His hair was still ruffled from sleeping, the way other people usually didn't get to see it when he was conscious. It made John grin, but before he could comment, Dave abruptly lifted his glance from his phone. Dave's mouth fell open as if he was about to say something, but then all that came out was a grunt that might have been a morning, and then he was out of bed and the room before John could have processed it.

John shrugged it off. Breakfast was normal enough that he would have forgotten about it altogether, no one's pancakes stayed where they were supposed to, and he felt like being sixteen was just maybe worth it with the friends he had. Before long, Rose and Dave had gathered their stuff and were about to leave, and for some reason that stayed mysterious to John, they left him alone with Jade and just in the right position that he could see them arguing about something on the lawn.

Jade hummed a silly melody while John watched as Rose crossed her arms and lifted her eyebrows at Dave, who was obviously spewing bullshit at her, even if only his back was visible from where John was standing.

“Sooo...”

John didn't have to deal with whatever conversation topic Jade had thought up to make everything even more awkward, because Rose and Dave chose that moment to come back in, and Jade bounded over to Rose as if she'd missed her for months. The girls out of sight – not without a giggle from Jade and a heavy glance from Rose – Dave strode over to John and poked him in the chest as if John hadn't just seen him argue with Rose.

“So, by the way, I have a second birthday present for you.”

John blinked. That was not what he had expected at all, but he was still ready to accept it, and waited for Dave to produce a gift from somewhere behind his back. Or his pockets, more likely, seeing as that was where his hands were momentarily stuffed. Dave produced nothing at all. He just wipped back and forth on his heels the slightest bit, bit his lip, and looked as if he was preparing for the speech of the century.

“Where is it? Did you forget to bring it and that's why Rose is so mad?”

Dave let go of his lip, and that was probably the only thing that made him look startled, because when he spoke again, startled was not what he sounded like. Subdued, maybe, as if he had given himself over to a gruesome but inevitable faith.

“Nah, it's not like – I mean, it's not a present I can really bring, alright?”

He looked to John as if searching for approval, that he had gotten the clue, whatever or wherever that clue might be, but John just shook his head slowly. What kind of present was a present that you could not bring with you somewhere? A hug?

“Whatever, it's not that important, you'll see later I guess. Bye.”

With a listless handshake and without giving John the chance to do more than weakly call bye after him, Dave was gone, and had once again created a mystery out of nothing. Rose came around the corner, took one look at John, and sighed.

“He didn't do it?”

“Uh, no? What was he supposed to do?”

“I'm sorry, but it's really not my place to tell you. And here I actually thought he was going to do it this time around.”

She didn't bother to explain any more before she was out the door as well, and John was left with Jade, who seemed to know more than she pretended to, but was stubborn, and also gone before long.

Even with the weird turn everything had taken in the end, it had still been an awesome day and a half he'd spent with his friends, and the good mood from that continued on for a while. For a while... and then the boredom started to set in. The most John could think of to do was look at his presents again, but he'd done that so intensively already that it didn't alleviate the feeling at all. It was barely half an hour that he couldn't think of anything else to do on the computer either, and his glance fell on the almost-forgotten notebook. He had still a few pages left that he hadn't read all through.

Even the notebook was boring to him after a while. No matter how amusing Dave's vocabulary and sentence structure was on a normal day, the topic that soaked through every page and line was the opposite. Especially now that the specific sort of fondness that shone through even the most vulgar turns of phrase was lost. He'd just said no, and now this thing they had was gone, and maybe it was more that boredom that bothered John. Maybe he was lonely. That shouldn't have made any sense, his friends were still there after all, but it rang too true.

After the last real entry in the notebook, there were a few blank pages that John had thumbed through without noticing, but then there was another block of text. It was Dave's handwriting, but a completely different structure than everything else in the notebook. It was longer than the other entries, but hastily written, so much so that the writing was illegible in parts even to someone who could read the handwriting on a normal day. He had read it before his mind had caught up, and when he had gotten to the last line he blinked, and read it again.

and i mean maybe i would like to try  
nah you know what he wont be up for it he doesnt even want to fuck the usual way so im not even gonna write it down

The second time around, John's eyes and mind were on the same page, and neither could or wanted to deny what Dave was saying here. It should have been weird. He should have been nauseous, maybe even disgusted at the thought, but he wasn't. He could point out a lot of things he didn't feel in this moment, but no description came to mind at what he did feel, nothing that could have been encompassed by one or two words. But it was a nice feeling, a smile on his face again despite everything.

A message came in at that moment.

~pesterlog~

TG: hey have you done math because if not you can copy from me  
EB: is that the second birthday present?  
TG: no

(The conversation goes on for a bit until this confession happens.)

TG: its kinda hard to express my feelings any other way  
TG: all im ever striving for is for you to stay  
TG: i know its hella hard to say this out loud  
TG: so ill use the chance to get it the fuck out  
TG: its been like this from the fresh fucking start  
TG: youre the sole owner of my poor lonely heart

John stared at the last words still flashing too brightly on the screen. He wasn't sure if he read them right, and if he did, then there was nothing to say he grasped their meaning. But there was not really any leverage for interpretation. He blinked, and where he before had felt as if he was trapped, looking at a wall building itself, now it seemed as though it had been a door all along.

(Somehow, they meet up again at John’s house the next day or something, and this conversation happens, which is honestly the best way to wrap this story up once and for all.)

„But... why would you?“

„Why would I what?“

„Why would you want to, y'know.“

„Look, I don't know if you get the same picture I do when someone says y'know, but if it's the same one, why would be kind of late to ask because it's already happened. And also you know exactly why.“

„What?!“

„Fucking. When people say y'know, they mean fucking, John.“

„That is not what I meant and you know it.“

„No, I don't know, because you didn't fucking tell me. But I believe in you. You can tell me what you meant by that, I know it.“

„Ugh. Why do you have to be such a stubborn horse's ass? I. I just. Why would you want to be in... in a relationship with me?“

„Dude.“

„Don't act as if that isn't a legitimate question!“

„Oh holy shit. I have a goddamn crush on you.

...ok, this is getting embarassing, just say 'no thanks' and I'll be outta here in a sec, no hard feelings, but don't just stand there and stare at me as if I just told you Rose was your Dad in disguise.“

„No!“

„What, no? No to me being in love with you or no to the Rose-was-your-daddy-all-along-theory?“

„Just- no- fuck it, come here, Dave, I don't care anymore.“

Warm arms enveloped him right as lightning struck outside and thunder rumbled after it, and as Dave pressed his chin somewhere, presumably a part of John's shirt, it was as if all those moments he had missed were coming to him at once. The first kiss with violins swelling in the background and fireworks exploding and butterflies in his stomach, and the first time without fumbling, only with loving eyes and gentle smiles, they lay in that simple hug, and the crescendo of nature outside was better than any film music could ever hope to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then they get together.
> 
> I hope you liked it despite everything, and maybe you'll like some of the work I'll hopefully do for other fandoms in the near future.


End file.
